


I Know How to Love Only When You're Holding Me

by kingess



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Courfeyrac, Established Enjolras/Grantaire, Fake/Pretend Relationship, M/M, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-29
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-02-22 01:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 16
Words: 50,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2488820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingess/pseuds/kingess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>When they climbed out of the car, Grantaire looked up at the clubhouse with trepidation.</em>
</p><p>  <em>“Nervous?” Courfeyrac asked him.</em></p><p>  <em>“Not as much as you are,” he said as Courfeyrac wiped his unnaturally sweaty palms against his jeans. “You need to at least act like you like Combeferre.”</em></p><p>  <em>“Oh, shut up,” he said. “I know how to have a fake boyfriend.</em></p><p> <em>Grantaire snickered at him, but Courfeyrac looked over the top of the car and saw Combeferre giving him a reassuring smile. He took a deep breath and tried to reassure himself that he could do this.</em></p><p>Courfeyrac and Enjolras grew up next door to each other, with their families so close they might as well be related at this point. So when Enjolras's older sister gets engaged, Courfeyrac knows he'll be attending the wedding--which isn't a problem until it becomes clear he's supposed to bring a significant other to the wedding. Not having dated anyone in the years since his last disastrous relationship and unable to tell his mother why he's given up on romance, Courfeyrac does the only logical thing--he brings along his new fake boyfriend, Combeferre.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

The phone call came when Enjolras was still at the law library. He was supposed to be looking up case studies for his Feminist Jurisprudence class, but he was rather distracted by a text he’d gotten from Grantaire an hour earlier saying he was making chiles rellenos for dinner—and while Enjolras knew correlation was not causation, correlation said that if they were having chiles rellenos for dinner then Enjolras was likely to spend most of the night naked in bed with his boyfriend. So when his phone rang, instead of checking the Caller ID, which he’d been doing religiously for the last two and a half months, he was thinking about all the things he wanted to do to Grantaire tonight and he answered the phone.

“Hello?” he said.

“Julien, darling?”

 _Shit_.

“Mom?” He pulled the phone away from his ear to check the Caller ID. It was the Courfeyrac’s home number. His mom was getting sneaky, going over to the neighbor’s like that. Normally she called from her cell phone or from the home number.

He had a special ringtone to warn against her calls.

“I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for ages,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ve been busy,” he said. “Law school and all.”

“I’m glad I got a hold of you, though. We need to talk about next week.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose and wondered if he could just hang up on her and pretend his phone dropped the call. “Courfeyrac and I are driving up next Thursday. We’ll be there in time for the rehearsal dinner.”

“Julien, this is your sister’s wedding! She’s only going to get married once!”

“Statistically, half of all marriages end in divorce,” he said. “Odds are this is just going to be her _first_ wedding. I’ll make it to the other ones. Besides, I’ll be there for the actual wedding. I said I was driving up on Thursday. Ceremony’s Friday. I don’t see a problem.”

“We’ve got so much more planned that whole week,” she said. “We need you here. Your sister wants you here.”

“Mom, I’m in law school and this is my second year—I’m interning with Myriel and Reed, I just can’t afford to take the whole week off.” Not to mention, he thought it was completely ridiculous that he was expected to take a full week off for his sister’s wedding in the first place. The wedding itself was only going to take an hour, tops. There was _no_ reason that he needed to take a week-long vacation from school and his internship and the half-dozen other things he had on his plate at the moment to sit around for pictures and lunches with his new in-laws. “Not to mention, my friends and I are heading up a rally to raise awareness about police violence against people of color this weekend.”

“Don’t give me that, Julien,” she said. “I’m friends with Courfeyrac on facebook, and I follow both of you on twitter. I know that happened last weekend.”

 _Shit_.

“I can’t take the whole week off,” he said again. “I just…I can’t.”

“This isn’t a debate. This is a family event—we want you here.”

“I can’t leave my boyfriend for that long,” he said, shoving his laptop back in its case. He felt a little guilty for using Grantaire this way, even though there was a time in their relationship when he really would have been uncomfortable with leaving Grantaire alone for any length of time—but Taire was doing so much better now and the depression and the drinking were both under control, and if Taire knew he were using him as an excuse like this, well, Enjolras knew how much he’d be hurt by the vote of no confidence.

“Your boyfriend? Since when have you had a boyfriend?”

 _Shitshit_.

“Uhm—”

“Julien? How long?”

“Two and a half,” he mumbled.

“What? Weeks? Months?”

“Years,” he said, sheepishly.

“You’ve been seeing someone for two and a half years, and you never told your own mother? Shame on you! I raised you better than that.”

“It’s not that,” he said. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to _hide_ him from you.”

She tutted him over the phone. “Your boyfriend is coming,” she said, as though the matter were closed.

Enjolras groaned. It had often been said that he got his stubborn will from his mother, and he knew that if she was going to insist on Taire coming, then Taire would be coming. “We can still only come up for the rehearsal dinner and the ceremony,” he said.

“You’re coming for the week,” she said. “Both of you—my son, hiding his boyfriend from his own mother for two and a half _years_ —you’re both coming for the full week, and that’s that. I want both of you in the family pictures.”

“Mom—”

“No, darling, this isn’t a discussion. I’ll see you next week. Oh, and tell Courfeyrac to bring whoever he’s with, too.”

“But, Mom, Fey’s not—”

“Julien, I have to go—your father’s on the phone with caterer right now. I love you and I’ll see you next week.”

The phone line went dead.

Shit.

He stared at the phone in his hand for a long moment before shoving it in his pocket and slinging his laptop case over his shoulder. He needed to go tell Grantaire about their very not-so-exciting plans before he broke the news to Courfeyrac.

~*~*~

When Grantaire and Enjolras had gotten an apartment together more than a year ago, Grantaire didn’t know that the small one bedroom apartment could feel so much like home. Before then, he’d practically been living with Enjolras anyway. Most of his clothes had been at Enjolras’s apartment, as had a smattering of his more expensive art supplies. (He could be described as careless in a lot of aspects of his life, but he wasn’t careless about his art and his old apartment had been a dilapidated studio in a shitty part of town—one break in had been enough to convince him that his apartment wasn’t a safe place for his art.) But for all that he spent most of his nights there, it had always been Enjolras-and-Combeferre’s apartment and no matter how welcome he’d been, he was always just a guest.

But their apartment now was completely their own, with Grantaire’s various sketchbooks and graphic novels and mythology books mixed among Enjolras’s (obscenely overpriced) legal textbooks and his never ending stacks of posters and pamphlets and informational materials about a half-dozen different causes, and Grantaire felt at complete ease here.

The only thing that could make it better now would be to have Enjolras home.

Grantaire had texted him over an hour ago to let him know that he was making chiles rellenos tonight. And Enjolras was smart. He had to have picked up on the fact that whenever Grantaire made chiles rellenos that they almost always had sex for dessert. It was a sure-fire way to get Enjolras to come home after long hours hiding in the bowels of the UC Davis Mabie Law Library. (Grantaire worked part-time at the local community center teaching art classes and spent the rest of his time illustrating picture books or working on the webcomic that he and Jehan had started last year, but in reality his full-time occupation was making sure that Enjolras didn’t work himself into an early grave and he was damn good at that job, thank you very much.)

He figured he must have texted Enjolras when he was in the middle researching something, because otherwise he would have come home by now. If he didn’t come home soon, Grantaire would try calling—and if that didn’t work, he’d have to hunt down his boyfriend in person.

When Enjolras eventually walked through the door, Grantaire was sitting on the couch doing some touch-up coloring for the webcomic on his Wacom tablet—a gift from Jehan, who refused to tell Grantaire how much he spent on it. (“Money’s not an issue for me,” Jehan had said when Grantaire tried to give the tablet back. “You know that. Besides, if we want this webcomic to be as awesome as we know it can be, then you need to have the proper tools.”)

“We’ve got a situation,” Enjolras said, dropping his laptop bag off by the door. He didn’t bother kicking off his shoes before coming to the sofa Grantaire was reclining on. He lifted Grantaire’s feet, took a seat, and resettled Grantaire’s feet on his lap.

Grantaire sat up a little, trying to get a better look at Enjolras’s face. “A ‘government trampling of human rights’ situation or a ‘Bahorel started a fistfight with some homophobic asshole’ situation?”

“This is serious,” Enjolras said. “My mother expects us to stay the whole week for my sister’s wedding.”

Grantaire felt he deserved an award for not rolling his eyes. Enjolras had been scheming for ways to get out of spending the week with his family since his mother mentioned it to him months ago, and Grantaire didn’t have much sympathy for him at this point. He knew Enjolras got along with his family far better than Grantaire did with his own, and while spending the week without Enjolras would undoubtedly suck, he didn’t think it was as big of a deal as Enjolras was making it out to be.

“I suppose the poor starving masses are going to have to survive without you for a week.”

“Taire.”

“To be fair, I did say that your mom was going to win out in the end, Enj. You should have expected this.”

“Taire, we’re both going.”

Grantaire cocked his head to the side. “I believe your exact words on the matter were, ‘No, Taire, you don’t need to worry about coming. I wouldn’t want to inflict this horse and pony show on anyone.’”

“Yeah, well, when I said that, my mom didn’t exactly know about you, but now she does, so she expects you to come. The community center won’t mind you taking off for a week, will they? But still, that’s not the biggest problem. Courfeyrac is—”

“Excuse me?” Grantaire said, his mind scrambling to process what _my mom didn’t exactly know about you_ could possibly mean.

“What?”

“Did you just say that your mom didn’t know about me before now?” he asked, swinging his feet off Enjolras’s lap and sitting up.

“Yeah.”

Anger and the first tendrils of self-doubt spiked through him. Was his boyfriend ashamed of him? Was that why he hadn’t told his family he was seeing someone? “Enjolras, we’ve been dating for over two years!”

“Yeah.”

“And it never occurred to you to tell your parents that you were seeing someone?”

“Well, no,” he said. “I’m an adult and it’s not really any of their business who I date and seriously, Taire, this isn’t the biggest concern we have—”

“No,” Grantaire said, “it damn well is. We’ve been having dinner with my grandmother every other Sunday for two fucking years, and you couldn’t be bothered to tell your parents about me?”

“It never came up!”

“Maybe because you were supposed to bring it up!”

Enjolras dragged his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry, okay? My parents and I have never talked about my love life before. It didn’t occur to me to say anything. And look, I’m sorry and I swear I’ll make this up to you or whatever, but we need to go talk to Courfeyrac about this before his mother calls.”

“Wait,” Grantaire said, his mind still scrambling to make sense of everything. “What does Courf have to do with any of this?”

“It’s complicated,” Enjolras said, which was what he and Courfeyrac had been saying for the last six years whenever anyone asked them about the strangely co-dependent relationship between their families. (Freshman year, it’d taken several months before they all realized that Enjolras and Courfeyrac weren’t, in fact, related.) “I’ll explain when we get there.” He stood up. “We really do need to hurry.”

Grantaire groaned as he got to his feet. Great. A field trip. Instead of taking the time to make sense of everything now, he’d have to wait in suspense. “I can’t fucking believe you didn’t tell your parents we were dating.”

Enjolras waved his comment off. “What’s that cupcake place that Fey likes so much? I’m going to need a peace offering.”

“It’s not far from his place,” Grantaire said. “We can stop on the way.”

When they got to the door, Grantaire grabbed his wrist before he could lock the door.

“You owe me big for this,” he said.

“Yes, yes, of course. I love you and you’re perfect, but seriously,” Enjolras said, looking worried, “if we don’t talk to Courfeyrac soon, this is going to blow up in my face.”

It was a fifteen minute walk to stop by the cupcake shop and then get to the apartment Courfeyrac shared with Jehan and Feuilly. Grantaire cradled with cupcake box against his chest while Enjolras rapped on the door with his knuckles.

Jehan answered the door. His short brown hair was disarrayed and there was red ink on his fingertips. They must have interrupted his grading.

“Is Courfeyrac home?” Enjolras asked.

“You don’t want to see him right now,” Jehan said, shaking his head.

“I need to explain.”

“No,” Jehan said. “You _really_ don’t want to see him right now.”

Enjolras paled. If Grantaire weren’t so annoyed with him, he would have reached out to grab Enjolras’s hand.

“Did his mom already call?” Enjolras asked.

Before Jehan could answer, Courfeyrac emerged from the back of the apartment and Grantaire could only recall a handful of times when Courfeyrac had looked this pissed off before—and he didn’t think he had ever seen that expression directed at Enjolras.

“You son of a bitch,” Courfeyrac said.

Jehan looked between Enjolras and Grantaire at the doorstep and Courfeyrac standing behind him.

“Would you look at the time?” Jehan said, without even glancing at a clock. “I’ve got more tests to grade. I’ll just leave the three of you to it, then.” He grabbed a stack of papers off the coffee table in the living room and disappeared to the back of the apartment, squeezing Courfeyrac’s shoulder as he passed.

“Can we come in?” Enjolras asked after Jehan had left. “I brought you a cupcake.”

“It’s a Better Than Sex cupcake,” Grantaire added, holding out the box.

The look Courfeyrac gave him suggested the joke was neither funny nor terribly clever, but he took the proffered box anyway. Enjolras seemed to take it as tacit permission to enter and Grantaire followed him.

“You’re still a son of a bitch,” Courfeyrac said again, setting the cupcake box down. “And your little peace offering does nothing to change that.”

“It was an accident,” Enjolras said. “I’ve been ignoring her calls for two months—I was just trying to get out of spending the whole week with them.”

“Because heaven forbid you spend some time with your family who you actually really like,” Courfeyrac said. As was often the case when he was upset, his tone was downright acidic. “I mean, it’s not like your parents are like the fucking Pontmercys. No. Your parents are good fucking people and instead of just agreeing to spend time with your fucking family—you tried to run from it because it was _inconvenient_ for you.”

“I’m sorry,” Enjolras said. “I didn’t mean to tell my mom about Taire and that’s what’s put you in this mess in the first place.”

“Yeah, and what the hell is that about in the first place?” Courfeyrac snapped. “You’re madly in love with him and you’ve been dating for-fucking-ever, and you didn’t tell your mom?”

“Thank you,” Grantaire said sulkily, collapsing onto the couch. He still had no idea what was really going on here, but he was glad that at least _someone_ thought it was ridiculous that Enjolras hadn’t told his family.

“Not helping, Taire,” Enjolras said.

Grantaire didn’t particularly care.

Enjolras turned his attention back to Courfeyrac. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to put you in this position—”

“Sorry,” Courfeyrac said. “But your lack of intention doesn’t exonerate you from this.”

“I know, I know and I’ll do whatever I can to make this up to you.”

“Not to derail the conversation,” Grantaire said, “but what exactly does Enjolras need to atone for?”

Courfeyrac sighed and deflated a little as he let go of some of his anger. “We were supposed to go stag to Lisette’s wedding together,” he said.

“And now that I’m bringing you,” Enjolras said, “Courfeyrac needs to find a date.”

“Not a date,” Courfeyrac said. “A significant other. Because you’ve been hiding your relationship for two fucking years, my mom’s gotten it into her head that I’ve been doing the same.”

While Grantaire thought it was absurd that Enjolras’s parents and Courfeyrac’s mom were operating under the delusion that Enjolras and Courfeyrac were colluding to hide boyfriends from them, he was beginning to understand the depth of the problem now and he couldn’t say that he blamed Courfeyrac for his anger.

Enjolras winced. “Courfeyrac, I’m—”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it, okay? You _know_ why I don’t date anymore,” he said.

“We’ll find a way around this,” Enjolras said. “We’ve got nearly a full week until we need to leave for home, and we’ll figure this out. I promise.”

He was using the tone of voice that Grantaire always considered his “earnest leader” voice. It was a tone that usually commanded trust and loyalty and Grantaire loved Enjolras’s “earnest leader” voice because Enjolras always meant exactly what he said when he spoke like that.

Courfeyrac didn’t seem to be as trusting at the moment. If anything, he looked bitter. It was a very un-Courfeyrac-like expression. “Sorry,” he said. “But I can’t take you at your word just now.”

Grantaire felt some of his own annoyance at his boyfriend fade when Enjolras looked like those words hurt worse than a punch to the gut.

~*~*~

Courfeyrac had been staring at his bedroom ceiling for approximately fifty-seven minutes when he heard a soft knock at the door. He didn’t need to ask who knocked. Only Jehan ever knocked with that sort of hesitant confidence.

“Come in,” he said. He was sick of his self-imposed isolation and Jehan had never failed to make him feel less lonely.

Jehan let himself into the room, his fluffy cat, Walt Whiskers, cradled against his chest. He took a seat on the edge of the bed and let the cat crawl over to Courfeyrac. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“Shittily.”

“I don’t think that’s been accepted into the English language yet,” Jehan said, “but you get points for trying.”

“I feel awful for yelling at Enjolras—”

“To be fair, sometimes Enjolras needs to be yelled at.”

“And I feel even worse about this stupid wedding.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Jehan asked.

And that was the great thing about Jehan—he never pressured anyone to talk when they didn’t want to. He offered up a listening ear and the quiet comfort of a friend, but he never pressured and he never prodded and he had a knack for knowing when he needed to back off, which wasn’t something Courfeyrac could say of a lot of his friends.

“It’s a clusterfuck,” he said, sitting up. He grabbed Walt Whiskers and settled the cat in his lap. Some things were easier to deal with when you had a fluffy animal to cuddle. “I was looking forward to going to the wedding. I was ready and I was prepared for all the ‘tell me about your love life, Courfeyrac’ questions I was going to get, and it was all going to be _fine_ , but Enjolras had to open his big fat mouth and now he’s ruined everything. My mom thinks I’m dating someone—no matter what I said, I couldn’t convince her that I wasn’t and she kept going on and on about how exciting it was that I was seeing someone and—I mean, I was only on the phone with her, so I couldn’t see, but I know she was winking at me every time I told her I wasn’t in a relationship with someone.”

“Does she know?” Jehan asked gently. “About you being ace?”

“No.”

“She might believe you about not seeing anyone if she knew,” Jehan said.

“I just—I can’t tell her, Jehan. I can’t—and it’s stupid, I know, it’s not like parents have been known to kick their ace children out of the house when they come out, but still—”

“You don’t have to justify not coming out to your family,” Jehan says. “It’s a personal choice and there’s no wrong or right way to go about it.”

“I know, I know,” Courfeyrac said. “I just—my mom is Christian, okay? Like _really_ Christian.”

“Has she ever had a problem with Enjolras? He came out to both your families when you were still in high school, didn’t he?”

“She’s never had a problem with gay people in general. She walks the whole ‘God made him that way’ line and she’s fine with it, really, but asexuality? She’s not going to think God made me this way, not when she thinks God expects us to multiply and replenish. No. This is going to look like _my choice_ and she’s going to think I’m being selfish and my mom’s got this thing about me settling down and having babies and having a happily ever after, you know? She was really messed up when my dad walked out on us and I know how lonely she is and I know she wants nothing more for me to have what she _doesn’t_ and I hate disappointing her, Jehan, and I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“I know you’ve sworn off dating,” Jehan said, “but you’ve still got plenty of people who like you. Could you ask one of them to come along?”

Courfeyrac shook his head. “This is a Big Family Event, you know? It’s not the sort of thing you bring a casual date-mate to. Besides, the problem isn’t that I need a date, the problem is that I suddenly need to have a significant other and you know why I can’t do that anymore.”

Jehan was, in fact, the only one of their friends who knew all of the reasons behind Courfeyrac’s self-imposed dating moratorium—and he intended to keep it that way. What happened was in the past and he had made peace with it as best he could, but there were certain scenarios he refused to put himself in anymore and having a romantic partner was one of those scenarios.

“Well,” Jehan said, reaching over to scratch Walt Whiskers behind the ears, “this is only a short-term solution, but you could bring a pretend girlfriend along for the week, couldn’t you? You could ask one of our friends, not just a casual acquaintance. You know any of them would help you out if you asked.”

“I can’t bring a girl along,” he said. “It’d just get her hopes up.”

“What about a fake boyfriend, then?” Jehan suggested. “Plant the idea in her mind that maybe the happily ever after she has planned for you isn’t the one you’ll have. She’s probably not going to get grandkids out of you—not biological ones, at least—and bringing a boyfriend might help her realize that because you and your partner just aren’t anatomically equipped for it. Baby steps.”

“Since when has pretending to be gay been a baby step for anything?”

Jehan laughed. “When have you ever done anything the conventional way?”

“Do you really think bringing one of our friends along as a fake boyfriend would work? Do you think someone will agree to it?” He had a hard time picturing it for himself. There’d been a point in his life where he could have easily pulled off a fake-relationship with any of his friends. There’d been a point in his life where he’d been flirty and affectionate with just about everyone he cared about, but those days were behind him.

He wasn’t sure he could even remember what being in a relationship felt like.

Jehan gave him a tender smile. “Any of us would walk through fire for you,” he said. “Spending a week with you and Grantaire and Enjolras and your families is hardly any sort of burden.”

Courfeyrac nodded and allowed himself to start nurturing the tiniest flame of hope that he could make this work.

~*~*~

By the end of the week, Courfeyrac still had no one to bring to the week of wedding festivities. Apparently Enjolras’s sister had picked the worst possible week to get married. None of his friends were available and Courfeyrac wanted to pretend that that didn’t bother him, but it did. Anxiety was starting to claw through him—enough so that he was starting to have nightmares again—and if he couldn’t find someone to be his fake boyfriend by tomorrow, he was screwed.

Combeferre, saint that he was, had noticed the change in Courfeyrac’s mood and invited him to do lunch, even though Courfeyrac knew that Combeferre just taken some sort of licensing exam earlier and that he probably hadn’t slept at all this week and that he had to be exhausted.    

Still, Combeferre dragged him off to the Musain for lunch and told him tell him what was going on.

“Everyone is busy,” he said to Combeferre after he explained the situation to him. “Everyone, Ferre. Bossuet and Joly are meeting up with Chetta down at Disneyland for their anniversary. Jehan has to proctor stupid state exams at his school. Marius has some thing with Cosette and her dads—he’s a nervous wreck about it, by the way—and Feuilly can’t afford to take off work for a weekend—never mind a whole week. And Bahorel—well, I didn’t ask Bahorel because I don’t think we’d make a convincing couple. But still, Ferre, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do at this point!”

“I can do it,” Combeferre said, swallowing a bite of his sandwich.

“You—what?” Courfeyrac said.

“I can do it,” he said again. “It’s actually perfect timing. I just took the USMLE and I’ve got the next two weeks off before I need to get back to work, and it’d be nice to get out of Sacramento for a bit. You and Enjolras are always going on about how beautiful Seattle is, and if I’m not mistaken, there are some museums up there that I wouldn’t mind seeing. If there’s time, of course.”

“Are you serious?” He couldn’t believe this. It was too easy.

“Why wouldn’t I be serious?” Combeferre said, adjusting his glasses.

“Aren’t you straight?”

“I prefer to think of myself as heteroflexible,” he said. “Besides, were you planning on having sex with whomever you’re taking to the wedding?”

“Ugh, no.”

“Then I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” Combeferre said. “Look, when we lived together, you cuddled with me all the time. I’d be up late studying and you’d just come out of your room and curl up next to me and do your readings for your classes. And don’t you remember? Marius thought we were dating for nearly a month when you met him at the beginning of junior year. I think we can pull off being fake boyfriends for a week.”

“Ferre, I could kiss you,” Courfeyrac said.

Combeferre just laughed. “The only thing I don’t understand,” he said, “is why you just didn’t ask me from the start, Fey. You’re one of my best friends. I’d do anything for you.”

“I figured you’d be too busy—med school and all.” It wasn’t like he was oblivious. Combeferre worked himself just as hard as Enjolras did, but Combeferre didn’t have his own Grantaire to look after him and make sure he ate and slept and took care of himself. Courfeyrac had been reluctant to burden him anymore.

“It’s worth it,” Combeferre said. “You’re worth it. We leave tomorrow?”

“It’s a twelve hour drive, so we’re leaving early.”

“You driving?”

“Enjolras is. He insisted. We’ll probably pick you up around six.”

“Anything I need to bring?”

“Clothes for a wedding? I don’t know. Pack light. We’ll be staying at my mom’s so you don’t need to worry about towels or bedding or any of that shit.” He hesitated for a moment. “Seriously, though. Thank you. You have no idea how much this helps.”

Combeferre’s smile was comforting. “It’s no trouble at all, Courfeyrac. Besides, who knows? It might even be fun!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading :) The next chapter will be posted by Saturday. Until then, feel free to say hello over on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	2. Interlude

**November, Six Years Ago**

Courfeyrac came out to his friends in a rather rousing game of Two Truths and a Lie during Thanksgiving break of their freshman year. As was the case with most friend groups, they had all managed to fall together in a series of unexpected (and rather fortuitous) events and by Thanksgiving they all knew each other well enough that various flings were starting to crop up among them. Eponine and Bahorel had slept together at least twice and there was…something going on between Joly and Bossuet, though Courfeyrac wasn’t sure what yet. At Halloween, Courfeyrac had gotten drunk with Grantaire and made out frantically for a half hour. When Grantaire had tried to progress matters by fumbling with Courfeyrac’s zipper, Courfeyrac had pushed him away—and Courfeyrac was grateful beyond words that Grantaire didn’t fight him.

But it’d been a close enough call that Courfeyrac wanted things out in the open among his friends. Just in case.

They were playing what Bahorel referred to as “Extreme Two Truths and a Lie,” meaning that they put wagers on every round and they were supposed to take a shot each time they failed to spot the lie, but mostly they just drank whenever they felt like it. Jehan, who was an astounding liar despite his guileless face, was winning when it came to Courfeyrac’s turn and maybe outing himself in a game wasn’t the brightest of ideas, but he was just drunk enough to not care.

“I’ve swum—swimmed? Swam?—whatever. I did the swimming in the ocean with dolphins,” he said. “I’m asexual, and one time, I got kicked out of Canada.”

He listened to his friends try to reason out his claims and he was unsurprised to hear that most of his friends immediately assumed his asexuality was the lie. It was a fair assumption, he supposed. Asexual representation in media absolutely sucked and most people thought that the word asexual solely referred to single-celled organisms. And Courfeyrac knew he was flirty and affectionate and most people assumed that he slept around. He didn’t mind those assumptions, for the most part. But these were his friends. He wanted to be honest with them.

Only a handful of his friends argued that the lie had to be one of the other two options.

“Are you kidding me? He flirts with everybody—no way he’s not into that.”

“Yeah, which is why it’s too obvious of a choice!”

“But Canada! No one gets kicked out of Canada!”

Enjolras, who had been forbidden at the beginning of the game to wager on Courfeyrac’s round (and vice versa), stayed silent. His only form of communication was to raise his eyebrows, as if silently asking Courfeyrac if he was sure about this.

Courfeyrac just nodded.

In the end—a completely unsurprising outcome of events—most people put their money on the idea of Courfeyrac being asexual, though Bossuet chose Canada (“Guys, not even I could get kicked out of Canada!”), and Jehan, Joly, and Combeferre put their money on swimming with dolphins, though Joly readily admitted that he was probably wrong but felt it was important to vote this way to express his opinion that swimming in the ocean was disgusting and no one should ever do it.

“So, Courfeyrac,” Grantaire said once the conversation died a little. “What’ll it be?”

Courfeyrac just smirked as he scooped up the asexuality wagers. He just made himself a wealthy man. Well, wealthy by college student standards.

“What?” Bahorel said. “No. You’re lying.”

“Not about this.”

“Dude, I’ve seen you pant after anything that moves. You’re not a plant.”

Jehan punched his roommate in the shoulder. “One: that was rude. Two: telling someone they’re lying about the way they identify is a shitty thing to do, so

“But—”

“But nothing,” Jehan said.

But Bahorel had been drinking a bit more than the others tonight, which was making him cantankerous, and he’d just lost no small amount of change. He turned to Enjolras. “You’ve known him forever—tell me he’s lying.”

Enjolras gave Bahorel one of his stern looks. “He’s not lying.”

“So do you, I don’t know, dude, do you even get hard?” Bahorel said to Courfeyrac.

Joly spit out the shot of tequila he’d just taken and Eponine raised her hands in a defensive gesture.

“I am _not_ drunk enough for this conversation,” she said.

“It’s not his job to educate you,” Enjolras said. Courfeyrac recognized the steely defensive tone in his friend’s voice and knew that shit was going to get bad if Bahorel kept this up. “I can send you some links.”

“It’s fine,” Courfeyrac said. He should have anticipated the questions and he blamed the lack of foresight on his not-quite-sober brain. “For the record, dude, my junk works fine,” he said to Bahorel. “And I’ve had sex before—I’m capable of it, sure—it’s just…meh. It’s not something I want.”

“Maybe you—”

Jehan put his hand over Bahorel’s mouth. “If you’re about to suggest that it’d be different if he did it with the right person, don’t.”

“I’m not trying to be rude or anything,” Feuilly said, casting a wary glance at Enjolras, “but if you’ve had sex, how can you be asexual?”

Courfeyrac sighed. This was the sort of conversation he should have when he was sober and not half-drunk and sleep deprived. “So, Asexuality 101, I guess,” he said. “It’s about the lack of attraction more than it is the behavior. So like, sometimes you probably see a girl and you think she’s hot and you think it’d be nice to do sexy stuff with her or whatever, yeah? I don’t have that. I see a girl—or sometimes a guy—and sometimes I think ‘oh she’s pretty’ or ‘he’s cute’ and sometimes I think it might be nice to cuddle and watch a movie with her or him, but that’s it. I don’t—I don’t know. It’s weird, I guess.”

“It’s not weird,” Jehan said with a gentle smile before he turned his attention to the others. “If we’re done with the Q&A, I’d really like to know whether Courfeyrac has been kicked out of Canada or if he really did swim with dolphins.”

“Oh, right,” Courfeyrac said. He had momentarily forgotten that they were in the middle of game. He reaches for the money Bossuet placed on getting kicked out of Canada. “Sorry, Boss,” he said.

“What? Seriously?” Bossuet said. “This is just my luck.”

Joly patted his knee.

Courfeyrac just smiled. “Enjolras and I tried to spend a weekend up in Vancouver over the summer. I think we had like sixty bucks between us, some stuff for sandwiches and a two-liter of root beer in the car. They turned us away at the border for ‘insufficient funds.’ But I’ve never been to any bit of ocean that is remotely warm enough for swimming in and the only dolphins I’ve ever seen were at SeaWorld.”

That, of course, got Enjolras and Jehan talking about the lack of ethics at SeaWorld and any institution that penned up large mammals like that, and the matter of Courfeyrac’s sexual orientation was promptly forgotten.

Later that night, when Courfeyrac and Grantaire stumbled back to their shared dorm room at the end of the hall, Grantaire grabbed his arm just before they went into their room. Despite how much he’d drunk that night, Grantaire looked surprisingly lucid.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?” Courfeyrac asked.

“When we were making out at Halloween—I mean, I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to put you in a situation that would make you uncomfortable. I’ve got my issues, but I’m not a shithead, you know?”

“Dude, don’t worry about it. I like kissing. I enjoy it. It’s just not that sexual to me. And you stopped when I told you to. That’s when I got uncomfortable and that’s when you stopped. It’s fine. You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”

“You sure?”

“Course I’m sure,” he said, smiling and gently pulling his arm out of Grantaire’s grip. “We’re still cool. Promise.”

“Cool.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Next chapter will be up on Wednesday. Until then, feel free to say hi over on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	3. Chapter Two

According to the GPS in Enjolras’s car, the drive between Sacramento and Seattle would take them nearly twelve hours—more than that, if you factored in stops for meals and gas and traffic around the big cities. The one time Courfeyrac and Enjolras had attempted making the drive home overnight instead of during the day, Courfeyrac had gotten them home in just under ten hours thanks to so much Red Bull that he didn’t sleep for another day and a half and to the fact that he consistently drove at least twenty miles over the speed limit the whole way and somehow managed to avoid being pulled over.

That was also the reason why Courfeyrac was, under no circumstances, allowed to drive Enjolras’s car on their road trips home anymore.

The drive home for Lisette’s wedding was standard, as far as road trips went. Enjolras drove for the most part, only trusting the car to Combeferre on occasion (which Courfeyrac and Grantaire both pretended to take offense at), and they cycled through “Welcome to Night Vale,” “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” (the NPR quiz show podcast that Enjolras was not so secretly obsessed with), and classic rock (which was played loudly at Grantaire’s request). Enjolras and Courfeyrac had made this trip countless times and they stopped at all the regular places for food and gas, but on this particular trip, Courfeyrac could not get himself to relax.

It’d been a while since he’d been home for any length of time. He changed too much in the final year of his undergrad and he knew his mom would recognize those changes and ask questions he didn’t want to answer, so he avoided extended trips home. He made it home for Christmas each year, but he never stayed long. He always truncated his trips with excuses at how much work he needed to do—excuses that were always backed up by Enjolras, whether knowingly or not—and he left before his mom or Enjolras’s parents could notice that something was wrong.

He hoped having Combeferre along would help him avoid those questions, but at the same time, he was beginning to doubt his ability to keep up this charade with any level of convincingness. It’d been more than _two years_ since he had dated anyone. He could barely even remember what being in a relationship felt like.

For most of the drive, he managed to do a pretty good job of distracting himself, so while he couldn’t relax (Grantaire, who was sitting in front of him in the passenger’s seat kept complaining that Courfeyrac kept kicking the back of his seat but Courfeyrac got fidgety when he got nervous and it wasn’t like Enjolras’s Prius was exceptionally roomy) he could at least occupy his mind with other matters—the work he needed to do for a case study he was supposed to be preparing for one of his law classes, or the fundraiser he and Enjolras were trying to organize for the under-funded community center that Grantaire worked at, or what he planned on getting his friends for Christmas, even if it was still eight months away. But when they were only a half hour away from home, they hit traffic on I-5—traffic that Courfeyrac warned Enjolras about every single time they made this drive and traffic that Enjolras still managed to hit regardless—and when they were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway, Courfeyrac could feel the anxiety start to build in his chest.

He couldn’t pull off a fake relationship. There was no way he could pull off a fake relationship. He’d be in relationships before. He knew how they were supposed to work. He was supposed to know everything about Combeferre—all sorts of silly little details like what his favorite dessert was or whether or not he liked olives on his pizzas—and Combeferre was supposed to know those things about him. And yeah, he and Combeferre were close, but they weren’t that close.

His mom was never going to buy this.

In an effort to feel that he had some sort of control over the situation, he started hounding Combeferre with questions. What was his favorite dessert? Did he like olives on his pizza? What about pineapple? What was his favorite childhood vacation? Who was his favorite elementary school teacher? Any question that came to mind.

This went on for nearly fifteen minutes before Combeferre asked him what he was doing.

“I need to know everything about you for this to work,” he said. He knew he sounded desperate, but there wasn’t much he could do about that now.

Grantaire undid his seatbelt (despite Enjolras’s protestations) and turned around his seat. “Let me get this straight,” he said, looking straight at Courfeyrac. “You’re worried that you don’t know Combeferre well enough to be in a pretend relationship with him?”

“This is a legitimate concern!”

“No,” Grantaire said. “It’s a bullshit concern. Courfeyrac, out of all our friends, you are the _most_ qualified to be in a fake relationship with any of us—and especially with Combeferre! You two have spent loads of time alone together while you’re scheming to keep this one out of trouble,” he said, jerking his thumb in Enjolras’s direction.

“I don’t need anyone to keep me out of trouble,” Enjolras said.

Combeferre and Courfeyrac both snorted.

“You’re giving me way too much credit here,” Courfeyrac said. “I barely know him!”

At that, even Enjolras turned around to give Courfeyrac a look.

“What’s his favorite color?” Grantaire asked.

“Blue,” Courfeyrac said. “But like a grey-ish blue, not blue-blue or turquoise-blue. It brings out his eyes.”

Combeferre had beautiful eyes, even if they were hidden behind ultra-practical glasses frames.

“When’s his birthday?” Enjolras asked.

“August 25.”

“And where was he born?”

“St. Cloud, Minnesota.”

“What’s he studying in school?”

“He’s in med school. He wants to be a pediatric surgeon. His hands are nice and steady for it.”

“And his proudest accomplishment?”

“He got that Academic Excellence and Achievement Award last year from the ASCP. He tried to downplay it, but I know it meant a lot to him.”

“And what’s his weirdest obsession?”

“Moths,” Courfeyrac said automatically.

“Moths are fascinating,” Combeferre said. “Being interested in them is not weird.”

“When I got you that moth book for your birthday two years ago, you spent the rest of you own freaking party looking through it instead of partying.”

“I regret nothing,” Combeferre said.

“See?” Grantaire said. “You’ve got this couple thing down pat. Now stop worrying.”

“So I know his birthday and his favorite color?” Courfeyrac said. “That doesn’t mean that we’re dating! I know all that shit about all of you. You probably do too.”

“Courfeyrac,” Enjolras said, “I can barely remember when _your_ birthday is and we grew up next door to each other. The only reason I remember anything like that is because you make sure it gets written down on my calendar.”

“But that’s not the kind of stuff family asks when you’re dating someone!” Courfeyrac said. “They’re going to want to know how we met and when we started dating and what we did on our first date and who asked who out first and who kissed who first and are we serious and are we living together and you sure as hell know that some nosey fucker is going to want to know who tops in bed!”

Courfeyrac was slightly breathless at the end of that speech and it was impossible to hide the anxiety in his voice. Combeferre rested his hand on Courfeyrac’s knee.

“Courfeyrac, what happens in the bed of our fake relationship is absolutely none of anyone’s business, and I have no problem letting anyone rude enough to ask that know that it’s none of their business.”

“And the rest?” Courfeyrac asked.

“You asked me out first,” Combeferre said. “I was too buried in medical textbooks to see much beyond my own nose, so you would have had to ask me out.”

“You would have taken him to a museum,” Enjolras said. Traffic was picking up a little as they reached northern Seattle. “But a science museum, not an art one.”

“Probably one of those interactive kid museums,” Grantaire added. “Otherwise you’d have gotten bored.”

“And I spent most of the time watching you mess around with exhibits,” Combeferre said, “and laughing harder than I had in months. I was the typical med school student—dying under the weight of my course work—and you breathed life back into me.”

“That’s so sweet, it’s sickening,” Grantaire said. “I’m sure your mom will love it.”

“Are you guys really inventing a fake history for me and Combeferre?” Courfeyrac asked. “This is weird, even for you.”

Grantaire laughed.

Combeferre, Grantaire, and Enjolras continued to map out the fake dating history, and by the time they reached Lynnwood, the suburb of Seattle that Courfeyrac and Enjolras had grown up in, they had settled on a pretty plausible dating story. They’d dating each other for about six months but only made their relationship exclusive sometime in the last few months, which both Combeferre and Courfeyrac agreed to blame on the pressures of grad school. They had a story for their first date, their first kiss, their first fight, and with these details in hand, Courfeyrac felt more prepared to face his mom with this sham.

When they pulled off the highway, Courfeyrac called his mom to let her know they were close.

“Hey, sweetie,” his mom said. “Where are you guys?”

“We just got off the I-5,” he said. “Because Enjolras refused to take 99 even though we would have dodged traffic. Anyway, we’re a couple of minutes from home and we’re wondering who’s house we should go to first.”

“Just come to the clubhouse,” she said. “We just got done with Lisette’s bridal shower, so we’re all still here. There’s leftover food too, if you boys are hungry. We’re all so excited to meet your boyfriends.”

And that brought back a flood of anxiety. This was never going to work.

“Yeah,” he said tonelessly. “We’re excited too.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” he said. “It’s been a long day and we’ve been on the road since six this morning. I’m just tired.”

“Well, I’m sure I can reign Gemma and Paul in and we’ll let you boys go to bed early tonight. We’ll see you in a few, all right?”

“Yeah, sounds good,” he said, hanging up the phone. “Enj, just head to the clubhouse. Apparently, we just missed Lissie’s bridal shower.”

“See?” Enjolras said. “Getting stuck in traffic was a good thing.”

As they drove through town, Courfeyrac pointed out things he thought would interest Grantaire and Combeferre. The elementary school they attended, the park where they’d nearly gotten arrested after Enjolras started a fight with some homophobic loser from their high school who called them a pair of fags. On the way to the neighborhood clubhouse, they passed Enjolras’s home, which Courfeyrac pointed out.

“I thought you guys were neighbors?” Grantaire said when Courfeyrac pointed out the house but not his own.

“Not next door, though,” Courfeyrac said. “Our backyards are connected.”

The neighborhood clubhouse was nestled at the end of the road next to the pool and tennis courts. The adjoining parking lot was mostly empty, but Courfeyrac saw his mom’s Honda and Enjolras’s mother’s Kia parked right next to the clubhouse.

Enjolras parked right alongside their cars.

When they climbed out of the car, Grantaire looked up at the clubhouse with trepidation.

“Nervous?” Courfeyrac asked him.

“Not as much as you are,” he said as Courfeyrac wiped his unnaturally sweaty palms against his jeans. “You need to at least _act_ like you like Combeferre.”

“Oh, shut up,” he said. “I know how to have a fake boyfriend.”

Grantaire snickered at him, but Courfeyrac looked over the top of the car and saw Combeferre giving him a reassuring smile. He took a deep breath and tried to reassure himself that he could do this.

~*~*~

Combeferre watched Courfeyrac closely as they entered the clubhouse. He knew Courfeyrac well enough to suspect that he was far more nervous than he was letting on and the whole point of coming along had been to be a support for Courfeyrac. So while Enjolras looked like he was bracing himself for some sort of onslaught and Grantaire looked like he might be walking to his death, Combeferre focused on Courfeyrac and the nervous half-smile on his face.

The clubhouse had been decorated for the bridal shower with lots of white lace and baby-blue streamers. A young blonde woman, who couldn’t possibly be anyone other than Enjolras’s sister Lisette, sat slumped in a chair, looking pleased but exhausted, surrounded by torn wrapping paper. Two middle-aged women—one tall and thin and blonde and the other shorter and darker and plumper—stood nearby chatting while they examined one of the gifts. Lisette spotted them first.

“About time you showed up,” she said. She sounded irritated, but she was smiling, so Combeferre assumed her irritation was the normal annoyance an older sister held for her younger brother and his friends. She hurried over to greet them, hugging Courfeyrac first and then Enjolras.

She was followed immediately by the mothers, and there was a lot of hugging and cheek-kissing and general fussing and Combeferre couldn’t help but notice that Courfeyrac was looking rather overwhelmed by all of it.

“Okay,” Enjolras’s mom, Gemma, said, taking a step back to get a proper look at the four of them. “Which boy belongs to whom?”

Enjolras groaned. “Mom, they’re not our _pets_. They’re people. They don’t belong to anyone.”

Grantaire stepped up and slid his hand into Enjolras’s. “I belong to this one,” he said with a smirk.

“Taire, you know how I feel about possessive language in relationships. It—”

But Grantaire ignored him and held out his right hand to Gemma. “I’m Grantaire,” he said. “And I’m sorry that your son neglected to mention my existence for the two and a half years we’ve been dating.”

“It just never came up,” Enjolras said.

“That’s why you’re supposed to bring it up, darling,” Gemma said. She turned to Combeferre. “So you must be Courfeyrac’s beau, then.”

“That’s right,” Combeferre said, smiling at her. He placed his hand on Courfeyrac’s back—low enough to look intimate, but high enough that he hoped it wouldn’t bother him. He felt Courfeyrac relax a little. “I’m Combeferre.”

“Oh, you talk about him all the time,” Diane, Courfeyrac’s mother, said to Courfeyrac. “Why didn’t you just tell me the two of you were dating?”

Courfeyrac tugged his hand through his hair, looking entirely uncertain how to answer that question. “It’s—uh—well—”

“Were you afraid I would be disappointed that you’re dating a man?” she said, suddenly very concerned. She reached out to squeeze Courfeyrac’s hand. “Sweetheart, surely you know that doesn’t matter to me—I just want you to find someone you can be happy with, someone you can start a family with—not that there’s any pressure, Combeferre,” she added with smile.

“But you boys must be starving,” Gemma said. She took Grantaire’s hand and pulled him into the room. “Let’s get you fed up.”

Combeferre moved to follow the others—road trips always made him hungry and years of living on a college student diet taught him to never pass up free food—but Courfeyrac held him back. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, quiet enough that only Combeferre could hear.

His eyes were wide, almost like he was frightened.

“You’re doing fine,” Combeferre said. “Let me know how I can help. I think everyone can tell that you’re feeling nervous about something. You’re so tense.”

“Ferre, I haven’t been with anyone since—”

“I know,” he said, taking both of Courfeyrac’s hands in his and giving them a comforting squeeze. “But I’m here for you, Courfeyrac. Whatever is going to make you feel the most at ease, okay?  This isn’t about me and what I want—we’re not even dating.”

“Are you two coming?” Diane asked from near the food table.

Startled, Combeferre did the first thing he could think of. He pressed a chaste kiss to Courfeyrac’s lips—he regretted the action immediately when he felt Courfeyrac wince. Shit. They should have talked about this before he went and did something stupid like kissing. He pulled back and smiled at Diane. He and Courfeyrac could talk about this later. “We just wanted a quick moment alone,” he said.

Courfeyrac played along, chuckling a little. Combeferre wondered if the sound sounded hollow to anyone else. Courfeyrac wrapped an arm around his waist. “We’ve been locked in the car with those two for nearly fourteen hours by now. I think we deserved this.”

“There’ll be plenty of time for that later,” Diane said. “We want to get to know everyone.”

“So,” Gemma said after Combeferre and Courfeyrac had helped themselves to the leftover buffet spread and taken a seat at a table with Enjolras and Grantaire. “How did you all meet?”

“Remember all that housing drama from our first year at college?” Courfeyrac said.

“You mean when we learned—again—that my baby brother doesn’t play well with others?” Lisette said.

“Lisette,” her mother chided.

“Actually, I think I was the roommate that no one could get along with,” Grantaire said.

“I don’t know why everyone complained about you,” Courfeyrac said. “We got along great.”

“Fey,” Lisette said, “you could get along with anyone.”

“Anyway,” Enjolras said, talking over his sister. “Taire and I roomed together for the first two weeks, but we spent most of that time arguing, and Courf and Ferre were rooming together, so then Courf and Taire swapped places, because I knew I could live with Courf but—”

“But I wasn’t a good match for Ferre, either,” Grantaire said.

“But that was a sleep schedule issue,” Combeferre said. “We didn’t argue like you and Enjolras did.”

“You should have heard the shouting matches,” Courfeyrac said. “You could hear them from the other end of the hall.”

“But we don’t argue like that anymore,” Enjolras said at the concerned look his mother was giving him. “Taire and I just didn’t understand each other back then.”

“We’re fine now, though,” Grantaire said. “We haven’t argued like that since we moved—”

“Mom,” Enjolras said loudly, cutting Grantaire off before he could admit that they were living together. “What’s the plan for this week? What’s going on that was so important for us to be here?”

Combeferre wasn’t sure if Enjolras noticed the look of confused hurt that crossed Grantaire’s face. Enjolras was normally pretty in tune with Grantaire’s moods, but Combeferre had to wonder if the sudden colliding of his romantic life and his family life was disorienting Enjolras.

“Well,” Gemma said, “we have church tomorrow, of course.”

“Church?” Grantaire said, looking alarmed.

“It’s just an hour long service,” Diane said. “And our minister is very welcoming of same-sex couples, so you have nothing to worry about.”

“Right,” Grantaire said.

Judging from his tone, Combeferre figured that Grantaire’s reluctance came more from not wanting anything to do with any sort of religion than it did from fear of a homophobic congregation.

“After the service, we’re doing a late lunch with the Daltons—that’s Nathan’s family,” Gemma said. “Grantaire, we would love for you to come with us, of course. And then we’re doing tux fittings and maybe a picnic on Monday.”

Combeferre touched Courfeyrac’s knee to get his attention. He wondered if the gesture appeared intimate enough. “Maybe while Enjolras is busy with that, we could check out some of those museums you mentioned?” he suggested. “Just the two of us?”

“That sounds doable,” Courfeyrac said.

Combeferre smiled. He wanted to give Courfeyrac the opportunity to relax somewhere where he wouldn’t have to keep up these pretenses.

“About that, actually,” Lisette said. “Courfeyrac, I know this is super last minute, but we found out earlier that one of Nathan’s groomsmen has to have an emergency appendectomy and he won’t be able to make it to the wedding. We were hoping that you’d stand in for him as one of the groomsmen. I mean, you’re practically family anyway.”

Courfeyrac’s smile was warm and probably the most sincere it had been all day. Of course it was, Combeferre thought, nothing cheered Courfeyrac up like the opportunity to help someone. “Of course, Liss,” he said. “I’d love to.”

The warmth of his smile chilled as soon as Lisette was out of her chair and hugging him. She was practically in his lap and she kissed his cheek and Combeferre could see how stiff Courfeyrac was at the sudden display of affection.

On the other side of Courfeyrac, Grantaire snorted. “Yeah, family,” he muttered.

If anyone else heard him, they ignored him.

Gemma continued with the week’s schedule when Lisette sat back down. “So we have the tux fitting on Monday, and Tuesday is Lisette’s bachelorette party. On Wednesday, we’re going to need all of you to help set up the church for the reception—Courfeyrac, I certainly hope you have your mom’s knack for DIY projects—and then the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner are on Thursday and the wedding on Friday!”

Enjolras scowled. “And we really needed to be here for all of that?”

Lisette matched his scowl with one of her own. “Are you seriously going to complain about this all week?” she asked. “Whining won’t change anything. Grow up and stop complaining.”

Combeferre recognized the look on Enjolras’s face—the annoyed, take-no-prisoners look that usually preceded him digging in his heels about something—but so did Courfeyrac and he effortlessly redirected the conversation, making Combeferre wonder how much of his childhood had been spent playing peace-keeper between Enjolras and his sister.

“I don’t know what he’s complaining about, to be honest,” Courfeyrac said. “Law school _sucks_ —literally, it’s sucking out my soul—and—”

“Literally?” Enjolras drawled.

“Yes. Literally. You must not be able to see the Dementors. Anyway, I for one am glad to have the break, and I know Combeferre’s excited to spend some time away from Sacramento.”

Combeferre jumped in with sights he wanted to see in Seattle while he was here and the possibility of Enjolras and Lisette arguing was quickly forgotten. They were still talking about non-wedding related plans when Paul, Enjolras’s dad, arrived. Like his children and his wife, he was tall and thin, though his hair was brown instead of blonde. He greeted them all with handshakes and made a few sly remarks about Enjolras and Courfeyrac being kept men now and Courfeyrac laughed hollowly at the joke.

After catching up with Paul, Gemma and Diane started cleaning up the decorations from the bridal shower. Courfeyrac was quick to offer his assistance—Combeferre figured everything would be easier for him if he kept busy—but when both women spotted the way he was yawning, Diane quickly suggested that the boys call it a night.

All four of them piled back in the car and Enjolras drove them over to Courfeyrac’s childhood home. Combeferre grabbed his and Courfeyrac’s duffel bags and followed Courfeyrac into the house and upstairs to his old room.

Combeferre wasn’t sure what he was expecting when Courfeyrac opened the door to his childhood bedroom, but when he saw the queen sized bed in the room, he knew it wasn’t that.

Just one bed.

For the both of them.

“Fey,” he said, “if you’re not comfortable sharing the bed, I can sleep on the couch. Seriously.”

Courfeyrac just shook his head and collapsed face first onto his bed. “I should have expected this,” he said, turning his head to the side.

Combeferre sat on the edge of the bed next to him. “Can we talk?” he asked.

“There’s nothing—”

“Please?”

Courfeyrac rolled over. He still looked distraught.

“I am so sorry about that kiss earlier,” Combeferre said. “We should have talked about it before I did anything like that, but your mom—I was caught off guard, not that that’s any excuse for putting you in that position. I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”

Courfeyrac sat up. “See? This why this is such a lousy idea,” he said. “None of this should be a big deal but you’re overthinking everything and I’m—shit, I’m just a mess and there’s no way my mom is ever gonna buy this bullshit relationship.”

Combeferre frowned, not used to hearing such a defeated attitude from Courfeyrac. “We just need to relax,” he said. “We can still make this work. But I do think we need to set some ground rules about what you’re comfortable with.”

“You don’t have to coddle me.”

“I don’t want to bring up any bad memories for you, either,” he said. “So we’re going to talk about this because we’re adults and that’s what adults do when they’re pretending to date each other.”

“Fine. But we’re going to have to keep kissing and shit because my mom’ll notice if we don’t.”

“Let’s start with kissing, then,” Combeferre said. “What are you comfortable with?”

“Hiding in a hole and never coming out?”

Combeferre gave him a look.

“Okay, fine. We can do chaste kisses—like what you did earlier. I was just—I was surprised, that’s all. It’s been a while. But, I don’t know, as long as the kiss isn’t really sexy or whatever, I’m fine. I’ve always been fine with kisses.”

“And hand holding? Cuddling? Hugging? What about things like that?”

“Look, as long as you don’t grab my dick, I’ll be fine,” he said.

“You promise?”

“Yes, I promise.”

“What about sharing the bed?”

“That’s going to be non-negotiable,” he said. “My mom will notice if one of is sleeping on the couch and she’ll think something’s wrong. She knows I had sex in high school. She’ll think it’s weird if I’m not sharing a bed with you now.”

“I promise I don’t snore.”

Courfeyrac snorted. “So already you’re a better roommate than Jehan.”

Combeferre grabbed Courfeyrac by the shoulders and turned him so he could massage his shoulders and neck. He knew that Courfeyrac carried a lot of tension in his back and shoulders. “You just need to relax,” he said. “You used to be one of the most physically affectionate people I know. You just need to channel that again.”

“Things changed,” Courfeyrac said.

“I know you used to worry about leading people on,” he said, “but you don’t have to worry about that with me. We’re on the same page here. I’m not going to be reading into anything that you do. And I know you worry about other people’s needs overstepping your boundaries, and that’s not an issue here either because as far as I’m concerned, my sole purpose right now is to help you through this. You have complete control over what we do or don’t do, and I won’t ask questions if you don’t want to do something. You can trust me, Courfeyrac.”

“I’ve always trusted you,” he said. Combeferre could tell by the softness of his voice that the massage was working and he was starting to relax. “You’re not the issue here. I am. I don’t remember how to do any of this relationship stuff. I’m going to screw it all up.”

“You’re not going to screw anything up,” Combeferre said. “And if you do, I’ll be there to run damage control.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading (and kudos-ing and commenting and all that good stuff!) The beginning feels slow (to me at least) but I feel like this is where the story really starts to take off!
> 
> Next chapter will be up on Saturday--until then, feel free to come say hi on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	4. Interlude

**March, Nine Years Ago**

Enjolras knew he didn’t like girls as early as nine (which was, coincidentally, around the same time that Courfeyrac got his first “girlfriend”—which basically meant the girl played with them at recess and Courfeyrac held her hand and gave her his pudding cup every day at lunch). By the time he was twelve, Enjolras knew he liked boys in the way that most of the boys in his class liked girls.

By that time, Courfeyrac had met a boy their own age—shy, but clever—and Courfeyrac started holding his hand in the halls and bringing him around at lunch time.

But it was also around then that Enjolras also began to suspect that when Courfeyrac talked about liking girls—or liking boys, he didn’t seem to have a preference either way—he didn’t seem to be talking about the same things that everyone else was. At the time, Enjolras didn’t have the words to explain it, but there was something about the way Courfeyrac talked about the people he liked that just seemed…different than the way his peers talked about it.

It was only in the last year that Enjolras had some confirmation that his hunch was right. He and Courfeyrac had been over at a mutual friend’s house to work on a group project and the boy showed them a gay porn video that he had stumbled across earlier in the day. As far as porn went, it was tame. Anal and hand jobs, nothing fancy, but it was the first time Enjolras had ever really seen two men together and it’d gotten his attention. Later, though, when they were alone, Courfeyrac brought up the video again.

“Did you like the video that Nicholas showed us?” he asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Did it…did you feel something?” Courfeyrac asked. “Because it looked like you were feeling something and I just… I don’t know.”

Enjolras shrugged. “It made me kind of…excited,” he said. “And horny, I guess.”

“I didn’t feel any of that,” Courfeyrac said. “But everyone says porn is supposed to make you feel like that but I just thought it was kind of gross. The one guy had his fingers up the other guy’s asshole. He shits out of there, Enjolras. That can’t be sanitary.”

“I’m not sure sex is supposed to be sanitary,” Enjolras said.

For a moment, Courfeyrac was quiet. Then he said, “Do you think something’s wrong with me?”

“Of course not,” Enjolras said. Whatever he did or didn’t know, he knew that there wasn’t something wrong with Courfeyrac. “Maybe gay porn just isn’t your thing. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you.”

After that, in his usual fashion, Enjolras dedicated himself to researching the matter and he’d unearthed entire online communities of people who called themselves asexual and whose experiences sounded so similar to Courfeyrac’s. He’d been waiting for the right time to bring it up because he didn’t want to start handing out labels that Courfeyrac might not necessarily want or appreciate, but he was prepared with talking points and statistics and that ever-comforting message of _you are not alone, you are not broken, here are other people like you._

He never thought that tonight, when his sister and the other cheerleaders were throwing a party at his house to celebrate the end of the basketball season, would be the night all his research would come in handy.

He had actually left the party more than an hour ago because loud music and crowded spaces and low lighting wasn’t exactly his definition of a good time, but he’d left Courfeyrac down stairs with a flock of his admirers—Courfeyrac always had admirers—when he retreated upstairs to the solace of his room and his laptop and his books.

Around eleven at night when the party was still in full-swing (his parents, the cowards, had retreated to the Courfeyracs’ for the night) and someone knocked on Enjolras’s door.

“Occupied!” he shouted because twice already half-drunk couples had stumbled into his room looking for somewhere private to continue their trysts.

The door opened anyway and Courfeyrac came in. “I thought I’d find you in here.”

Enjolras was often accused of not being very perceptive when it came to other people—a fact that he attributed to his interest in more important things—but it was impossible to mistake Courfeyrac’s expression for anything other than distress.

“Are you okay?” he asked, setting his laptop aside. “Have you been crying?”

“I just—I threw up just now. I hate throwing up.”

“Shit, are you drunk? Your mom is going to kill you!”

“I’m not drunk,” he said. “I wish I was drunk. I wish—I think I just had sex?”

“You think?”

“I mean, I was inside her, but I…it…sex is supposed to feel good, right? I don’t feel so good.”

“Shit,” he said again. “Shit, I’m sorry, Fey. C’mere.” He waved Courfeyrac towards the bed and Courfeyrac crawled on top of it, snatching a pillow from the head of the bed and cuddling it to his chest.

Courfeyrac looked even worse close up.

He hesitated before asking his next question. “Fey, did you—did you want to have sex with this person? Did you agree to it?”

“I just wanted to see,” Courfeyrac said. “I needed to know if I just didn’t get this sex stuff because I’d never had it. Everyone kept telling me I’d change my mind once I had it.”

“And did it change your mind?”

He shook his head. “I don’t get it. I mean, it didn’t feel bad or anything, just…It wasn’t right. It didn’t feel right.”

“That’s okay, Courfeyrac.”

“No, it’s not. It’s supposed to be magical. I’m supposed to want sex all the time! What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing is wrong with you,” he said. “There are plenty of people out there who don’t want sex or don’t like sex.”

Courfeyrac snorted with derision. “I appreciate the effort, Enj, but you don’t need to lie to me.”

“I’m not lying,” he said. “Seriously. I researched this.” He laid out the facts and statistics and anecdotes that he’d discovered over the last few weeks like he was preparing a case for the debate team. Courfeyrac looked skeptical until Enjolras started pulling up websites on his laptop.

“Asexual,” Courfeyrac said slowly, as though testing out the feel of the word in his mouth.

“And some people are aromantic—they don’t have romantic attractions,” Enjolras said, “but I don’t think that’s you, but that’s okay too, because all these websites say that your sexual orientation and your romantic orientation don’t have to match.”

“Asexual,” he said again. “I am asexual.” He hesitated for a moment, like he was mulling everything over, but then he nodded. “I like it. It…it fits.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, folks! Thanks so much for reading and your kudos and your comments. Seriously giving me the warm-fuzzies over hear! The next chapter will be up on Wednesday, but until then, you're always welcome to come say hi on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	5. Chapter Three

Courfeyrac woke to the sound of someone knocking at his door. He groaned. He didn’t know what time it was, but it was too early.

“What?” he croaked.

“Courfeyrac? Are you and Combeferre up?”

“Are—what?” _Combeferre_? What the hell? He sat up and saw Combeferre sprawled face down on the bed next to him and remembered the convoluted predicament he was in. And Combeferre wasn’t wearing a shirt. When did that happen? Courfeyrac hauled himself out of bed and opened the bedroom door. He blinked blearily at his mother.

“I tried to let you boys have a bit of a lie in,” she said. “I know Enjolras must have had you on the road before dawn yesterday, but church is in two hours and Gemma made breakfast for everyone next door.” She peered past him to Combeferre, still shirtless in the bed. “Unless you would rather…”

He could feel his face flushing. Having his mom make insinuating remarks about his sex life had been embarrassing enough when he’d actually _had_ a sex life. “We’ll head over in a few minutes,” he said.

She winked. “Take your time,” she said.

When Courfeyrac closed the door, still reeling from the fact that his mom was winking at him and that she thought that he and Combeferre were going to get frisky while she was still in the house, Combeferre rolled over and sat up. His hair stood at odd angles to his head, and in another circumstance, Courfeyrac would have been tempted to smooth it down. It wasn’t a temptation he allowed himself right now.

“You’re blushing,” Combeferre said.

“You’re shirtless,” Courfeyrac retorted.

“I’m not used to sharing a bed,” he said, reaching down to grab his shirt off the floor. “I overheated. Did you sleep okay? You were tossing and turning a lot.”

It wouldn’t do either of them any good for Courfeyrac to admit that it took him nearly two hours to fall asleep last night. He hadn’t shared a bed since Christopher and even though he knew—he _knew_ —that Combeferre wasn’t going to do anything or try anything when Courfeyrac was asleep, he couldn’t stop thinking about the times when he didn’t have that guarantee.

So he shrugged. “Couldn’t get my brain to shut up.”

“If it’d make you more comfortable, I can—”

“I’m not going to make you sleep on the floor,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll be better tonight.”

And if it wasn’t, he was sure his mom still kept that nighttime Benadryl in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and that always did a good job of knocking him out pretty quick.

Combeferre studied him for a moment. “If you’re sure,” he said. “Did your mom say something about breakfast?”

“Next door,” he said. “Our moms take turns doing breakfast on Sundays. Don’t bother showering or getting dressed—it’s not expected. You might want to comb your hair though.”

He flattened his hair with his hand as he yawned. “Will there be coffee?”

“It’s Enjolras’s house,” Courfeyrac said. “Of course there will be coffee.”

They both put on shoes and, after a slight hesitation, Courfeyrac asked to borrow the sweater Combeferre had worn in the car yesterday. The mornings were chilly here and borrowing Combeferre’s sweater seemed like a boyfriend sort of thing to do. Combeferre agreed, of course, and Courfeyrac led him through the gate in the fence to Enjolras’s home. Everyone except Lisette was already in the kitchen by the time they arrived and Courfeyrac endured knowing looks from his mom and Gemma and one dirty joke from Paul about morning sex.

Diane laughed, remarking that they couldn’t make these sort of jokes when the boys were younger.

Courfeyrac ignored them as best as he could and helped himself to breakfast—French toast made of cinnamon bread and whipped cream and fresh fruit—and Combeferre stuck close to him the entire time. He wasn’t sure if it was because Combeferre needed to be shown where the plates and silverware were kept or if it was because he felt the need to protect him from Paul’s inappropriate jokes, but he appreciated it either way.

Enjolras and Grantaire were already seated at the table while the parents milled around the island in the kitchen. Both of them looked wretched and grumpy. Of course, Enjolras normally looked that way in the morning, but Grantaire usually only looked like that when he was hungover. Grantaire, at least, was picking at his food. All Enjolras could seem to manage was glaring at his coffee mug.

“You know, Enj,” Courfeyrac said, sitting down, “that coffee works better when you drink it instead of just staring at it.”

Enjolras flipped him off.

Combeferre looked between the two of them. “Are you two okay?”

“Didn’t sleep well,” Grantaire said.

Enjolras managed to roll his eyes. “Understatement,” he said. “Mom didn’t let us sleep in the same room and neither of us are used to sleeping alone.”

Combeferre looked startled. He glanced back at the parents before saying, “Is it because you’re both men?”

Courfeyrac shook his head. “It’s because they’re not married,” he said around a mouthful of French toast. “She probably doesn’t let Lisette share a room with her fiancé when he’s over, either.”

He wished his own mom had that same hang-up—it would have made everything last night a hell of a lot less complicated—but she had resigned herself to the fact that her son had a sex life when he was a teenager and, instead of acting horrified or ashamed that he wasn’t waiting for marriage, she made sure that she had a series of very frank discussions with him about safe sex and consent. Enjolras’s mom preferred to pretend that her son wasn’t having sex at all, even when all the evidence indicated otherwise.

When Courfeyrac was half-way through with his French toast, Lisette emerged from the second floor. Unlike the rest of them, she had actually bothered to shower before breakfast—Courfeyrac suspected it was an effort to get hot water while she had the chance. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel and she wore a fluffy purple bathrobe.

Knowing Lisette, it was unlikely that she was wearing anything more than a towel underneath.

She draped herself along the back of Courfeyrac’s chair and reached around him to snatch a raspberry off his plate. She ate it, then grabbed another and fed it to Courfeyrac.

“You boys look happy to be alive,” she said dryly. To Grantaire, she added, “Make sure Enjolras didn’t take the decaf on accident, otherwise he won’t wake up properly until this afternoon.”

Grantaire smirked. “Ten steps ahead of you.”

“Aw, you’re such a good fit for him,” she said. She nuzzled Courfeyrac, not unlike a cat, as she reached around for another raspberry.

He accepted the attention because this was Lisette and this was just what she did and it wasn’t like he hadn’t lapped up this sort of attention for years when they were younger. To protest now would make it look like something was wrong. Still, he couldn’t exactly help the way his body tensed she did stuff like that. He’d started withholding his own physical affection years ago when he got sick of people taking more than he was willing to give, and now this sort of familiarity just made him uncomfortable.

Lisette kissed the top of Courfeyrac’s head and went to get a plate of breakfast herself. He hunched down his chair, pulling Combeferre’s sweater tighter around him.

“I don’t know if you noticed,” Grantaire said to Enjolras, “but your sister seems to like Courfeyrac a shit ton more than she does you.”

“They’ve always been of a more similar temperament,” he said. “Same interests and all that. People used to think they were dating in high school.”

Courfeyrac snorted because Enjolras had no idea how close to the mark the assumption that he and Lisette had dated actually was.

Regardless of their past, though, he really wished Lisette would keep her distance a little better now.

Combeferre leaned in close, his fingers tangling in the curls at the nape of Courfeyrac’s neck in a way that made him want to purr like a cat. “You’re tense,” Combeferre said in his ear. “Are you okay?”

He nodded, acutely aware that his mother was watching the pair of them.

“If I need to act like the rabidly possessive boyfriend to get her to keep her distance,” Combeferre said gently, “I will.”

Sometimes he forgot how freakishly perceptive Combeferre could be. “Thanks,” he said. “But it’s fine, really. She’s just…” He shrugged. “She’s just Lisette.”

And there really wasn’t any other way to describe her. When they were little kids, people often thought that it Lisette and Courfeyrac were siblings—always teasing each other and draping themselves over one another—and if it weren’t for the undeniable family resemblance in the Enjolras family, Courfeyrac would have entertained the notion that he and Enjolras had been swapped at birth—never mind the fact that Enjolras was a good five months older than him. As teenagers, he and Lisette had grown closer. Where Enjolras had been preoccupied with various pet causes, Courfeyrac had been going to parties and running in the same crowds as Lisette.

They were practically family and Lisette was affection with the people she cared about. She’d probably hang on Enjolras the same way if he’d tolerate it.

“Well,” Combeferre said, “ _Just Lisette_ should learn to keep her hands off other people’s boyfriends…especially if she’s going to be getting married at the end of the week.”

~*~*~

Combeferre hadn’t been raised in a particularly religious home. His mother was a neurologist and his father was a chemical engineer and both of them put their faith in data rather than any sort of deity, but they’d both been supportive of Combeferre in his own quest to figure out if a spiritual life was something he wanted for himself. As a teenager, he’d read endless books on different faiths and had dragged his parents to dozens of different churches. He treated it like a science experiment, trying to find correlations and weed out contradictions. He never did find a faith that he felt at home with and these days, when people asked, he described himself as agnostic. He didn’t necessarily believe in any sort of higher power, but he couldn’t prove that one didn’t exist either.

For him, going to church with Courfeyrac and his mom and Enjolras and his family wasn’t anything that was particularly onerous or burdensome. It was a typical nondenominational Christian church and, next to the front door of the church, hung a rainbow flag bearing the words, “God loves all His children.” It made sense to him that his friends’ parents would find a faith-home in a place that was so welcoming.

The sermon was on service and loving thy neighbor and Combeferre found the minister’s take on philosophy interesting enough to pay attention to, which was more than he could say for his friends. Courfeyrac’s head kept bobbing as he slipped in and out of sleep, and Enjolras was doing that thing where he stared blankly ahead of him. Some people might mistake his expression for mild interest, but Combeferre knew Enjolras well enough to know his mind was on anything but the sermon. As for Grantaire, not five minutes into the service, he’d pulled out a small pocket notepad and was scribbling in it. From what Combeferre could see, the drawings seemed to be caricatures of various people in the congregation.

The only time Courfeyrac looked alert was during the hymns. He perked up immediately when the piano started playing and he could sing each hymn perfectly without looking at the hymnal, despite the fact that he sang a different line of harmony with each verse. Combeferre had never really heard Courfeyrac sing before—at least not seriously, because he’d heard Courfeyrac sing in the car or the shower plenty of times before—and he was surprised at the smooth, pure quality of Courfeyrac’s voice.

“I didn’t know you could sing that well,” he whispered at the end of an intermediary hymn.

Courfeyrac smiled smugly. “I was star of the youth choir here ever since my voice dropped. The choir director nearly cried when I left for college—said he’d never find another kid who could sing ‘O Holy Night’ for the Christmas service as well as I could.”

Before Combeferre could respond, a grey-haired old lady from the pew in front of them turned around to shush them. Courfeyrac offered up a contrite smile and said, “Sorry, Mrs. Donahue.”

Immediately after the service, Enjolras and Grantaire were swept off to attend the family luncheon, and Combeferre turned to Courfeyrac. “So…what now?” he asked.

“We’re going to be stuck here for a while,” he said. “Mom’s going to want to talk—if we’re lucky she won’t show us off to everyone—but she’s got the car, so we’ve got to wait for her.”

“I don’t mind,” Combeferre said. “Are you doing okay?”

“You don’t need to coddle me, you know.”

Combeferre smirked. “I’m just being an attentive boyfriend.”

Courfeyrac rolled his eyes. “Try over-attentive,” he said. He looked up across the chapel and then groaned.

“What’s wrong?”

“You see that soulless looking snake with the fake smile?”

A man, maybe a year or two older than them, fitting that description was headed their way—although Combeferre had the distinct impression that the man was stalking them out like they were some sort of prey. He turned back to Courfeyrac. “Who is he?”

“His name is Roy. He’s an asswipe Enjolras and I went to high school with,” Courfeyrac said. “He was the president of our school’s GSA when I started ID-ing as ace and he essentially told me that if I wasn’t into dick then I was just a straight ally.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t go back to the GSA until after he graduated, and Enjolras got suspended for three days after he broke Roy’s nose for saying that to me.”

Combeferre narrowed his eyes at Roy, who was still stalking his way through the chapel towards them. “Let’s go prove him wrong, then.”

“What? No, Ferre, you don’t understand. This guy is a condescending, gate-keeping asshole and I do my best to avoid him every time I come home.”

“Well, he’s headed right toward us,” Combeferre said, “so I don’t think we have a choice on the matter.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth when Roy caught up to them. He took a seat in the pew in front of them and turned around so he could talk. “Courfeyrac,” he said. His voice rang with falsity. “Who is your _charming_ friend?”

Courfeyrac’s face settled into a stubborn expression. “This is my boyfriend,” he said. “Combeferre, this is Roy.”

“Boyfriend?” Roy asked. “You’ve finally come out, then?”

“I’ve been out since I was fourteen.”

Roy laughed. “Oh yeah, you’re straight but without the sex.” His tone made it evident that he thought that was some sort of joke. “I mean _really_ out, Courfeyrac. We all knew you were gay back then. There was no reason for you to stay closeted for what—ten years? I’m glad that you’re finally comfortable with yourself.”

“But he’s not gay,” Combeferre said, cutting in before Courfeyrac could say anything more. “He’s asexual.”

“You mean he’s celibate,” Roy said.

“No,” Combeferre said slowly, as though he were talking to a small child. “I mean he doesn’t experience sexual attraction. Courfeyrac and I are dating, but we don’t have sex—not that that is _any_ of your business. He doesn’t want it and I’m not interested in having sex with someone who’s not interested in having sex with me.”

“Then you’re not really dating.”

Combeferre turned to Courfeyrac. “Fey, love, did I miss the memo that said people have to be having sex in order to be dating? Are we officially not boyfriends every time we’re not having sex? Because that just complicates things.”

Courfeyrac smirked. “If you missed that memo, I did too.” He turned to Roy. “Love and sex are not one and the same.”

Combeferre gave Roy a concerned look. “Are you seeing anyone?” he asked. When Roy shook his head, he continued, “You know, maybe you might want to reconsider your own stance on sex and love. The pressure to constantly be performing sexually can really tear apart a relationship. Maybe if you let your heart lead instead of your dick, things will work out next time.”

Roy’s face turned an awkward shade of red—whether from embarrassment or anger, Combeferre wasn’t sure. He managed to smile, though it looked more like a grimace. “Well, I’ve got to get going,” he said. “But it was nice to meet you, Combeferre. I hope you and Courfeyrac are very happy together.”

When Roy was out of earshot, Courfeyrac started laughing. It took him several minutes before he could breathe well enough to talk. “Shit, Ferre,” he said. “That was _amazing_! Did you see his face?”

“Liked that, did you?” he asked.

“You have no idea how long I’ve waited to put that condescending jerk in his place. Seriously, Combeferre, I think you just made Christmas come early.”

Courfeyrac’s face was a perfect picture of delight and he looked far more at ease than he had in nearly a week. Combeferre was inordinately pleased that he could contribute to that delight.

“Oh, look,” Courfeyrac said, getting to his feet. He took Combeferre by the hand and tugged him up. “There’s that the girl who told me I was appropriating queer culture because I was just an ally. Can I show you off to her too?” Courfeyrac pulled him from the pew and into the aisle, glancing back with and adorably mischievous expression on his face. “Just don’t tell my mom,” he said. “She’ll say this terribly un-Christian of me.”

Combeferre laughed and allowed himself to be pulled along.

~*~*~

After enduring more than an hour of bible thumping, Grantaire was ready to go home. He wasn’t feeling well. Not mentally, at least. He and mental wellness had a perilous relationship but he was at the point that he could recognize in himself the signs that he was about to tank. He couldn’t sleep at all last night, and had chastised himself while he streamed Netflix and tried to work on some of his commissions that he shouldn’t be that dependent on Enjolras in the first place because it was unattractive.

It had been a small balm to learn that Enjolras slept just as poorly as he had.

He needed sleep. He needed to exercise to flood his body with endorphins. A few years back, he’d been on antidepressants and those little pills had done a wonderful job of stabilizing his mood, but the long-term side-effects didn’t sit well with him and with the help of his therapist and Enjolras, he learned other ways to cope and to stabilize his mind. Sleeping regularly. Eating regularly. Exercising more. Meditation. Cutting back on the drinking and eliminating the smoking all together. Avoiding refined sugars and excess caffeine and keeping track of his daily moods and sorting out what things were likely to make him feel glum and which things were likely to set him off in a spiral of shame and self-doubt.

The location of the lunch did absolutely nothing to help the matter. Grantaire wouldn’t say that he grew up poor, necessarily—he knew he had a lot more than a lot of kids he went to school with did—but finances were tight enough that he and his mom rarely went out to eat when he was a kid. Even after she remarried and their finances were a bit more stable, a fancy night out was a dinner at Applebee’s. This place was several ranks above that. It was swank. A privately owned little place where it was expected that patrons be dressed in suits and dresses.

Grantaire decided that any venue where it wasn’t acceptable for him to wear jeans and a t-shirt wasn’t a place he wanted to be.

They had arrived at the restaurant before the Daltons and were seated at a long table in a secluded corner of the restaurant. While Enjolras’s parents talked about the church service and the upcoming nuptials, Grantaire fiddled with napkin at his seat, folding it and unfolding it and wondering how long it would take to teach himself origami. Enjolras reached over and gently brushed the hair out of his face. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Didn’t sleep well,” he responded automatically.

Enjolras nodded, studying him carefully. Grantaire knew a lot of people didn’t think that Enjolras was capable of focusing his passion on something so small as a single person, but Grantaire knew otherwise. Enjolras treated his relationships with the same fervor that he did his causes—but the effect of having such a passionate man focus all his energy on a single person was often…overwhelming, to say the least.

“We don’t have to stay,” Enjolras said. “I know my family can be kind of…overbearing and if you’re not up to that right now, we can go.”

Part of Grantaire—the part that was still annoyed with Enjolras—wanted to be offended at the assumption that he’d be set over the edge with something as simple as a lunch, but it wasn’t an unfounded assumption. Not in the least. Enjolras was all too familiar with his moods and knew that his mind was usually just a few short steps away from destructive. On a good day, a night of poor sleep was a minor inconvenience, but on a bad day, it could be devastating. The concern in Enjolras’s eyes was real. Whatever else, Grantaire knew that much.

He put his hand on Enjolras’s knee. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I can make it through lunch. I’ll probably go for a run when we get back to your parents’ place.”  Hopefully the endorphins would jolt him back from whatever edge his mind was determined to crawl its way towards.

“Want me to go with you?” Enjolras asked.

Enjolras was a decent runner, though he hated running if he didn’t have a good reason to do it. He could bolt away from the cops in record time at a protest gone wrong, but recreational running was not a favored pastime. It was thoughtful of him to offer.

“I’ll be fine on my own,” he said.

“Are you sure? I really don’t mind.”

He must be worried.

Grantaire was saved from having to remind his boyfriend just how much he hated running by the arrival of the Daltons.

Grantaire had long believed that Enjolras was the sexiest man in the history of sexy men, but when he removed his own biases, he had to admit that Nathan Dalton ranked fairly high on the list of sexy men. He lacked Enjolras’s perfect bone structure and the endless blue eyes, but like Enjolras, he was classically beautiful. The sort of man who wouldn’t look out of place next to a Michelangelo sculpture. Grantaire supposed that, given a few years, if Lisette and Nathan were still together and, assuming that he hadn’t accidentally screwed up his own relationship, Grantaire would be a _de facto_ uncle to some remarkably pretty babies.

Lisette made the introductions. The parents all knew each other at this point—after months of wedding planning, Grantaire would have been astounded if they hadn’t met—but Nathan had two younger sisters, the youngest still a teenager, and of course, Enjolras and Grantaire needed to be introduced as well.

“This is my brother, Julien,” Lisette said. “And that’s his boyfriend, Grantaire.”

Nathan reached across the table to shake Enjolras’s hand, then Grantaire’s.  “Lisette didn’t mention you were seeing anyone,” he said.

“Yeah,” Lisette said, “that’s because we didn’t know. He and Courfeyrac threw off the entire seating chart with their secret boyfriends.”

Enjolras rolled his eyes. “Like finding two extra seats is that big of a deal.”

Lisette sighed. “You have no idea the amount of work that goes into this.”

“Besides,” Enjolras said, speaking over her. “If Courfeyrac and I had had our way, this wouldn’t be a problem. You’re the ones who insisted they come.”

“That’s enough,” Paul said. “Let’s all sit down before you two start World War Three over here.”

A waiter came along shortly thereafter to take drink orders. Other than Nathan’s teenage sister, Grantaire and Enjolras were the only ones who didn’t order wine and Grantaire knew Enjolras only passed on it so Grantaire wouldn’t feel left out. Over drinks and appetizers, everyone relaxed and the parents at the table asked polite get-to-know-you questions to everyone. Grantaire didn’t miss the way that Enjolras seemed to scrutinize every word out of Nathan’s mouth, as though he were looking for faults or trying to prove that this man wasn’t worthy of his sister. But Nathan seemed to be a good guy, someone that Enjolras might actually, genuinely get along with in the future.

When the conversation about blood relatives had dried up, the attention turned to Grantaire.

“So,” Richard, Nathan’s father, said, “are you in school too, Grantaire?”

Grantaire looked up abruptly from his salad—salads were good, for all they were rabbit food, but they helped keep him stable. “What?” he asked.

“Are you still in school?”

“Ah—no,” he said shortly. “Grad school wasn’t for me.” He neglected to mention that college in general wasn’t for him. He never finished his undergraduate degree and had no desire to change that.

“Are you working, then?”

“I teach art classes at a community center in Sacramento,” he said, shrugging. “And I do some contract work for illustrations for children’s picture books for a few publishing houses. It’s not much, but it pays the bills.”

“Grantaire is a brilliant artist,” Enjolras said quickly. “And a great teacher. You should tell them about the webcomic, Taire.”

“They don’t want to know about that,” Grantaire said. People like this never wanted to hear about something as plebian as webcomics.

Allison, Nathan’s youngest sister, looked intrigued though. “You do a webcomic?” she asked. “Which one?”

“It’s called _Panaceum_ ,” Grantaire said. “It’s really no big thing. And our friend does most of the writing. I just do the art.”

“I’ll have to check it out,” she said.

Jehan would be pleased. He always liked getting new readers.

“Taire has actually been contacted by an editor in New York,” Enjolras said. “They’re looking into publishing the webcomic as a graphic novel.”

Everyone around the table made vague noises of interest, but Grantaire felt his face flush a little. Neither he nor Jehan had any serious interest in traditional publishing. Grantaire didn’t want to deal with the deadlines and Jehan didn’t want to give up creative control, and Grantaire was relatively certain that Enjolras _knew_ all of that. To hear Enjolras bring it up now…well, it felt like Enjolras was trying to leverage the prestige of traditional publishing to impress the Daltons and his own family—like Grantaire wasn’t good enough on his own to impress them.

“Probably nothing will come of it,” he said. “And I’m not sure if that’s what I’d even want, anyway—we’re doing just fine off the ad revenue from the website.”

Luckily after that, the subject of his employment dropped, but they quickly moved on to questions about his family, which Grantaire didn’t find any easier to handle. He never liked the looks of pity he got when people found out his dad died when he was only six, and he never liked the looks of judgment he got when he explained that his mom remarried when he was fourteen and that he didn’t have much to do with his family any more even less. People always seemed to think that _he_ was the reason he didn’t get along with his stepdad and never stopped to consider that maybe it was because his stepdad was a raging asshole.

By the end of the meal, Grantaire was certain Enjolras’s family had more than enough details to condemn him as an unfit boyfriend and he could only hope that things were going better for Courfeyrac and Combeferre.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! The next chapter will be up on Saturday. Until then, feel free to come say hi over on[tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	6. Interlude

**October, Five Years Ago**

In all honesty, it wasn’t Grantaire’s first time being booted out of a bar or a club or anything like that, and he doubted this would be the last time either. Judging from the show Courfeyrac was putting on, though, this was the first time he’d ever been kicked out.

He was rather indignant about it.

“They kicked us out!”

Courfeyrac was just drunk enough that he stumbled when he threw his arm out in a wide gesture towards the club. He wasn’t coordinated enough for that kind of momentum at the moment.

Meanwhile, Grantaire massaged his hand. Decking that son of a bitch in the face had _hurt_. Why did no one ever talk about how much it hurt to punch people? “Yeah, they did,” he said.

“And _you_ punched someone!” Courfeyrac said, rounding on him now. “You got us kicked out!”

“Won’t be the last time,” he said. “Do you think my knuckles are going to bruise?” He thrust his hand under Courfeyrac’s nose in a demand for him to inspect it.

Courfeyrac just swatted it out of the way. “What’d you go punching that guy for?”

“He was trying to shove his hand down your pants!”

“Well, yeah—he was a grabby bastard, but you didn’t have to punch him! Now what are we supposed to do for the rest of the night?”

Grantaire cocked his head to the side. “It doesn’t bother you?”

Courfeyrac looked like Grantaire had just asked a stupid question. “Of course it bothered me, but what the hell am I supposed to do about it? I tell him I’m not interested and then he gets grabby and then I let him know that I’m _really_ not interested and then he tells me I’m some sort of cocktease or some shit and then we part ways and I can go back to dancing! You didn’t have to punch him—now we don’t get to dance!”

After that night, Grantaire didn’t bring up the punching incident again. He’d shared a dorm room with Courfeyrac last year and he knew that Courfeyrac didn’t like people making a big deal out of his asexuality—“It is what it is,” he always said—and even though Grantaire thought the punching had more to do with some stranger acting like a rape-y asshole than it did with Courfeyrac being asexual, he thought it best not to mention it.

But he did keep an eye on Courfeyrac whenever they went out clubbing together. Grantaire went more for the drinking and for the escape—he was becoming increasingly desperate for anything to distract him from the dark (and, at times, violent) thoughts that threatened to swallow him whole—but Courfeyrac loved the dancing and he loved the attention he got from other people. He even liked the touching—the close press of bodies on a dance floor—as long as it didn’t cross into sexual territory. But every time they went out together, there was always at least one asshole who didn’t believe Courfeyrac when he said _thanks but no thanks_. And when that happened, Grantaire was on hand to remind the offender that _no_ really did mean _no._

Plus it was always fun to watch Courfeyrac splutter at him after he got them kicked out of another club.

“If you keep this up,” Courfeyrac said after one particularly memorable night that ended with Grantaire needing stitches, “we’re going to get banned from every decent club in town.”

All of this changed, however, when Courfeyrac started dating. Her name was Jessica and she was a pleasant enough girl. Courfeyrac had met in her at a club one night and then it ended up that they were in the same stats lecture at school and they hit it off.

Grantaire knew that Courfeyrac occasionally fooled around with the people he dated, so he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised to come home one night to the sounds of Courfeyrac and his girlfriend carrying on in the other room. All their other roommates were out and the walls in the apartment were thin. Grantaire could hear the faked enthusiasm in Courfeyrac’s voice. It was painful to listen to. Knowing better to intrude, Grantaire retreated to his room, put on his headphones, and waited until Courfeyrac’s girlfriend went home in the morning before he emerged from his room.

Grantaire was at the kitchen island pouring himself a drink—vodka and orange juice, a perfect way to start the day—when Courfeyrac emerged from the bathroom.

“Morning, R,” Courfeyrac said, towel drying his hair. “Anyone else home?”

“Just you and me.”

“Good,” he said. He poured himself a bowl of cereal and his eyes lingered on Grantaire’s mug. “Is that—shit, Grantaire, are you drinking vodka? It’s not even noon!”

“Yes,” he said, “and it’s also Saturday. It’s not like I have anywhere to be. Besides, the whole notion that you shouldn’t drink during the day is contrived bullshit—not to mention, I think I deserve a little something to help me forget the sounds of your little sexcapade last night.”

Courfeyrac winced. “You heard that?”

“You weren’t exactly being quiet.”

“Sorry about that. We, uh, got a little carried away—and before you say anything, yes, the whole thing was completely consensual, so don’t you even start on that whole thing. It’s bad enough having Enjolras second guess me every time I decide to have sex.”

“Was it though?” Grantaire asked.

“Was it what?”

“Was it consensual?” he said. “I mean, yeah, I believe that you said yes or whatever, but it didn’t really sound like you were enjoying yourself. Not genuinely, at least.”

“So what? Now you’re a judge of my sexual performance? I enjoyed myself, okay? End of story.”

“Yeah, that’s just not what I was hearing through the walls. I can tell when you’re faking enthusiasm, okay?”

Courfeyrac shrugged. “Okay, so the sex wasn’t mind-blowing. It never is for me. But Jessica wanted it and she enjoyed it and my enthusiasm—faked or not—was meant to be a reassurance for her. People get self-conscious about sex. I didn’t want to make her feel insecure just because I’m not wired right.”

“You’re wired just fine,” Grantaire said. “I just want to be sure that you’re not being pressured into something you don’t want. If you want to have sex because you like the way it makes your partner feel even though you don’t get anything out of it, that’s fine. But I’m not okay with you doing something because you feel it’s expected of you.”

“Love is about meeting people half-way,” Courfeyrac said. “If I’m not willing to do that, I shouldn’t be seeking out relationships like this. I know what I’m doing.”

Grantaire studied him for a long moment. Courfeyrac looked happy enough. He didn’t look like he was feeling pressured or coerced, and Grantaire supposed that would have to do for now. “Just make sure that she’s meeting you half-way too, okay? You have the right to expect that from people.”

“Consider it noted,” Courfeyrac said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, folks! I hope you're enjoying reading this as much as I've enjoyed writing it! The next chapter will be up on Wednesday. Until then, feel free to come say hi on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	7. Chapter Four

As Courfeyrac pulled the suit coat off the hanger to pull it on, he could hear Enjolras complaining from the fitting room next to his.

“Tuxes, Lissie?” he said. “You’re making me wear a tux?”

Lisette ignored him, as she had been doing whenever Enjolras started complaining about the wedding plans. Courfeyrac wasn’t sure if Enjolras was really this annoyed by the wedding—though opulent displays of wealth normally annoyed Enjolras, so Courfeyrac wouldn’t have been surprised if that were the case—or if this was just some petty attempt to make Lisette and their mother regret making him come home for the wedding early (which wasn’t the most mature reaction, but Enjolras had a hard time being mature where Lisette was concerned). For his part, Courfeyrac thought a tux fitting was the least of his concerns. He was a bit feeling better about this whole pretend boyfriend mess. Combeferre was going out of his way to be sweet and charming towards Courfeyrac’s mom and supportive and understanding toward him—and Courfeyrac knew he shouldn’t have expected anything different. Combeferre was constant and steady. Combeferre was pretty much the definition of “good boyfriend material.” Smart and kind and funny and shit—how was he supposed to explain to his mom that they “broke up”?

Because while he’d forgotten how nice it was to have someone who’d hold his hand or give him a hug when he wanted it, he had no misconceptions that this fake relationship was going to last any longer than it absolutely needed to.

And that stirred a certain sadness in him.

He shoved the thought out of his head and straightened the suit coat over his shoulders and stepped out of the fitting room. It was a simple black tux with a baby blue waist coat and tie. The color did nothing for him really—much more suited to Enjolras’s complexion than his own—but the tuxedo fit well over his shoulders and even though it was a rental, the fabric and tailoring indicated that money had been poured into this suit. It was probably shallow, but he thought it was hard to feel bad in clothes this nice.

“It’s a bit long in the sleeves and the pants,” he said, stepping in front of a mirror when one of the store workers waved him forward.

“Nothing a little hemming won’t fix,” Lisette said. She was practically beaming, clearly pleased to see some aspect of the wedding going smoothly. Courfeyrac was sure having a groomsman drop out last minute had caused her no small amount of stress. “Mom, doesn’t he look perfect?”

Courfeyrac looked into the mirror, but instead of looking for Gemma, he saw Combeferre sitting with Grantaire. Combeferre was watching him with a look in his eye that Courfeyrac couldn’t quite place, so he quickly looked away. Even still, he could feel his face flushing. Shit, this was embarrassing.

“I don’t get what the big deal is,” Enjolras said, coming out of his fitting room. Where Courfeyrac was built along shorter and sturdier lines, Enjolras was taller and lankier. The sleeves of his suit coat were a touch too short and when he walked, Courfeyrac could see his bright red socks. “Marriage should be about commitment to another person, not flowers and tuxes and fancy dresses. Do you have any idea how many better uses I could put this money to?”

Gemma flicked the back of his head, which made Grantaire snort. “It’s a big deal because marriages are something to _celebrate_. Your father, Lisette, and I have the money matters well in hand, so why don’t you follow Courfeyrac’s example and stop complaining.”

“Mom, I saw the price tag on this thing,” Enjolras said. “It’s completely overpriced considering I’m probably only going to wear it once—”

“Which is why we’re renting it, dear,” Gemma said.

While Enjolras continued to complain about the opulence of weddings to his mother and sister, Combeferre got up from his seat and stood behind Courfeyrac.

“Come for an inspection?” Courfeyrac asked, standing at attention while the store worker pinned the hem of his pants.

“You look amazing,” Combeferre said. “I should have known you’d clean up well.”

“Ah, well, everyone looks good in a tux,” Courfeyrac said. “We should get you and Grantaire one. Then we can be a matching set.”

“Oh, I’m sure Enjolras would love that,” Combeferre said.

Courfeyrac smirked at him. “I want to see if Lisette can make his face as red as his socks.”

The store worker stood and gave Courfeyrac instructions to go change back into his clothes.

“Poor man,” Courfeyrac said as the worker went to go pin Enjolras’s tux. “If Enjolras doesn’t stop squirming, he’s going to get stuck with pin.”

“I’m not sure he wouldn’t deserve it.”

“I’m surprised Grantaire hasn’t come around to calm him down,” Courfeyrac said, shrugging carefully out of the jacket so he didn’t stick himself with a pin. “He’s normally pretty good at that.”

“Grantaire stepped outside for some fresh air,” Combeferre said. “You didn’t notice?”

Courfeyrac glanced behind him and sure enough, Grantaire was gone. He frowned. “Was he okay?”

“I think he was getting sick of listening to Enjolras whine about money, to be honest,” Combeferre said. “It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

Courfeyrac wasn’t so sure about that. If he didn’t worry over his friends, then who would? “He was looking kind of glum yesterday. Are we sure he’s okay?”

Combeferre grabbed his hand and squeezed it and Courfeyrac was startled at the warmth that spread through his body at the gesture. “I’m sure he’s fine,” Combeferre said.

When Combeferre let go of his hand, Courfeyrac’s heart was pounding oddly and he wasn’t sure why.

~*~*~

That afternoon, Gemma wanted to do some family pictures—informal photographs of her family to go along with the formal wedding photos at the end of the week. Combeferre was amused that Gemma’s idea of family photos meant including Courfeyrac and his mom, but she absolutely insisted on it. Courfeyrac and Enjolras both offered up half-hearted protests—“We’re not _really_ related. You know that, Mom, right?”—but Courfeyrac didn’t act like this was all that unusual.

“Enjolras and I went in together to get her a Nikon camera when we left for college,” he said. “My mom was already well on her way to becoming a DIY queen, but Gemma needed a hobby and she’d always liked photography. We were just trying to be thoughtful—we didn’t know we’d be creating a monster.”

The weather was nice and they were gathered in Enjolras’s backyard, which was meticulously tended by Enjolras’s father, Paul. For all people complained about Seattle weather, Combeferre hadn’t found it overly cloudy or dour. Granted two days of experience hardly made him an expert, but he could see why Courfeyrac and Enjolras were so fond of their home town.

Across the yard, Courfeyrac was laughing and joking as he posed for pictures with his mom. He seemed much more at ease now that the novelty of him having a “boyfriend” had worn off on his mother, which was what Combeferre had been hoping would happen. Over the last few years, Courfeyrac had trained himself to be restrained with his affections, but when Courfeyrac was relaxed and among friends, glimpses of his old effusive self weren’t uncommon. Combeferre was glad that Courfeyrac was relaxed enough for that to happen now. He knew how worried Courfeyrac was that his mom would start asking nosy questions, but Combeferre hoped that as long as Courfeyrac could act like his old self, Diane wouldn’t even think she needed to ask those questions in the first place.

Meanwhile, Enjolras and Grantaire were bickering—which was absolutely nothing new. Bickering was one of their primary forms of communication, and Combeferre had once seen them heckle each other one morning in their apartment while preparing breakfast and coffee in the kitchen in complete synchronization. An outsider would think that there was something wrong, that they were an unhappy couple, but an outsider wouldn’t see the fire in Enjolras’s eyes nor the pleasure in Grantaire’s at having Enjolras’s attention focused on him. Combeferre—and the rest of their friends, for that matter—had learned to tune their bickering out years ago. It was impossible to get anything done if you didn’t.

But Combeferre had also trained himself to listen for the slight signs and deviations that indicated that this was more than their habitual bickering. More sharpness, less exasperation. More nitpicking, less logic. They were subtle shifts, but learning to recognize them had been a necessity in the early days of Enjolras and Grantaire’s relationship. Recognize the signs and you could divert the argument before one or the other said something truly hurtful.

Combeferre didn’t know all the details, but he knew that Grantaire had been going through a rough time when he and Enjolras started dating, and while their relationship was a source of stability for Grantaire during that time, the drama in his life had caused him to lash out indiscriminately at those around him. Instead of talking about the root of his problems, Grantaire would instead instigate brutal, no-holds-barred arguments with Enjolras that almost always ended with Enjolras saying something cruel or thoughtless and Grantaire storming out of the room

Combeferre and Courfeyrac had learned pretty quickly the most effective ways to run damage control on those nights.

Eventually, Enjolras learned to recognize the signs that Grantaire was spoiling for a fight and learned to divert those arguments himself. That was, of course, unless he was stressed or under too much pressure, in which case, he was usually as eager for a fight as Grantaire was.

As it was now, Combeferre thought there was no reason to be worried about Enjolras and Grantaire yet, but there was a certain amount of sharpness in their voices that seemed to indicate something was beginning to fester under the surface.

Courfeyrac, finished with the pictures with his mom, strolled over. He picked a bit of grass off Combeferre’s shirt and smoothed his collar.

“Gemma wants to do couples pictures,” he says, jerking his head to where the blonde woman was herding Enjolras and Grantaire to a different patch of grass where the lighting was better. Enjolras and Grantaire were still bickering. “We’re on up next after those two—though, whether they can shut up long enough to get a decent picture is still up for debate.”

Combeferre laughed. “So are you going to cut my head out of all our pictures together when we ‘break up’?”

“No, but Mom will. You have her completely smitten. She thinks you’re the most wonderful man in the world, and I think she might already be planning our wedding.”

“Sorry about that.”

Courfeyrac shook his head. “I knew that when I brought you home—you’re every mother’s dream for her kid. I think she might like you more than me, at this point. When I dump you, she’ll probably call you up and the two of you can trash talk me for hours and go on and on about how I was never good enough for you.”

“Oh, you’re going to dump me?” Combeferre said, smiling. “Who says I’m not going to dump you?”

Courfeyrac assumed a lofty expression. “I’m the heart-break _er_ , my dear Combeferre. Not the heart-break _ee_. I’m afraid you never stood a chance.”

“Well, then, I’ll be sure to act properly devastated when your mom calls to console me after you break my heart.”

“She’ll probably send you cookies,” Courfeyrac said. “I expect you to share them with me.”

“If I get cookies because my fake boyfriend dumps me,” Combeferre said, “then I am damn well going to keep them for myself. If you want cookies, then you’re just going to have let me dump you.”

Courfeyrac laughed, a bright and loud sound. “This is really messed up, isn’t it?”

“A little,” Combeferre admitted.

Across the yard, Enjolras and Grantaire’s bickering tipped over its boiling point when Grantaire’s cell phone started ringing.

“It’s that publishing house in New York,” he said bitterly, checking the caller ID. “See? This is why I don’t want to publish the stupid webcomic! These people interrupt everything!”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Enjolras snapped, calling after Grantaire as he stormed away to answer his phone.

“Are they always like that?” Lisette asked. She had emerged from the house and she wrapped an arm around Courfeyrac’s waist and pulled him close.

“This is par for the course,” Combeferre said.

Lisette rolled her eyes. “Should have known he’d end up with someone he could argue with,” she said. “He’d be bored to tears if he couldn’t dig in his heels and shout about nonsense every so often.”

“You should see them when they really get going,” Courfeyrac said. His tone was light, but he crossed his arms over his chest and Combeferre had to wonder just how comfortable he was with Lisette being so affectionate with him. “What you’re seeing here is Enjolras-and-Grantaire Lite. Is this fiancé of yours ever going to show up, Lissie? I’m beginning to think he doesn’t exist.”

“Oh, aren’t you cute,” she said. “He just got off work and he’s on his way over. I want you to meet him. I think you’ll like him.”

“Enjolras seemed impressed yesterday.”

“That’s because my darling baby brother thinks that all the men I’ve ever been with are idiots,” she said. “So he just expected Nathan to be the same.”

Her phone rang and she pulled it out of her pocket to check the caller ID.

“That’s Nathan,” she said, leaning in to give Courfeyrac a kiss on the cheek before smacking his butt. “I’ll just leave you two to it, then.”

Combeferre waited till she was out of earshot before he turned back to Courfeyrac.

“Is she always like that with you?” Combeferre asked. Courfeyrac roughly rubbed his hand over his cheek where Lisette had just kissed him.

“Yeah, I guess.” He shrugged. “We were each other’s firsts, and after that, touching like that just seemed normal.”

“Firsts?”

“You know,” Courfeyrac said. “We lost our virginity to each other.”

“Enjolras told me once that you threw up after the first time you had sex.”

Courfeyrac looked surprised that Combeferre knew that. “I did.” Something of Combeferre’s indignation must have shown on his face, because immediately Courfeyrac said, “Look, it was completely consensual. She didn’t…take advantage of me or anything, if that’s what you were thinking. I was fifteen, and I’d had a beer, which was enough to make me stupid, and we had sex. I just…I wasn’t prepared for what that meant for me and I didn’t feel right afterwards, so I puked. Probably had more to do with the beer than anything else, to be honest.”

“Does Enjolras know about this?”

“Do you honestly think he would let her touch me at all if he knew? Look, Combeferre, this happened nearly a decade ago. And yeah, it was kind of lousy—but I’ve felt that way about most of my sexual experiences. She was just the first, that’s all. It doesn’t bother me.”

“But it does bother you.”

“What?”

“Fey, you stiffen up like a board every time she touches you.”

“I didn’t used to be like that,” he said. “I’m just not used to it, that’s all.”

“I think this is more than just not being used to it,” Combeferre said. “You can talk to me, you know that.”

Courfeyrac was saved from coming up with a satisfactory lie—and from the expression on his face, it was obvious he was about to lie—when Lisette ushered Nathan over.

“Nathan,” Lisette said, “this is Courfeyrac and his boyfriend, Combeferre.”

“Liss has told me all about you,” Nathan said, smiling as he shook Courfeyrac’s hand. “Thanks for stepping up to be my groomsman.”

“Anything for Lissie,” Courfeyrac said.

“You’re coming to the bachelor party tomorrow night, right?”

“I didn’t know there was one,” Courfeyrac said, laughing a little. “But I’d be happy to come along—I’m not one to pass up a party.”

“Great,” Nathan said. “All the groomsmen are coming—and boyfriends are more than welcome.” He nodded toward Combeferre. “My best man has it all sorted out. I guess we’ll be hitting up some dance clubs and maybe a strip club or two.”

“Wait, what?” Enjolras said. He’d been lingering on the fringe of the conversation as he watched Grantaire talk on the phone across the yard. “I didn’t agree to this.”

Nathan looked a little uncomfortable, but Lisette just rolled her eyes. “You agreed to it when you agreed to be his groomsmen, you twit,” she said.

“I didn’t know at the time that being a groomsmen would involve being dragged around to clubs to watch a bunch of women dance around in their underwear!”

“Well, luckily for you, you’ll be going to gay strip clubs,” Lisette said.

“What?” Enjolras and Courfeyrac said at the same time.

“I’m bi,” Nathan said. “We’re treating this as my last hurrah to dick.”

Courfeyrac snorted, but Lisette gave Enjolras a cold look.

“Way to succumb to heteronormativity,” she said icily. “Now how about you get off your moral high horse and accept the invitation without acting like a douchebag.”

“It doesn’t look like I have much of a choice,” Enjolras said.

“Glad to see we understand each other,” Lisette said.

~*~*~

That night, Courfeyrac couldn’t take his eyes off Combeferre in the kitchen with his mother. Everyone was gathered at his house—Paul and Nathan watching the Mariner’s game on the TV while Enjolras and Grantaire bickered in hushed tones. Well, mostly hushed tones. Whenever their volume got too loud, Paul barked at them to be quiet. Lisette and Gemma were also at the table, discussing last minute wedding plans for what Courfeyrac assumed to be the four hundredth time. And Courfeyrac sat at the island in the kitchen while Combeferre helped his mom bake cookies.

His mom was _clearly_ taken with Combeferre—more so than she already had been this morning. They’d been at their baking for a half hour now and she had already invited Combeferre to come back for Thanksgiving and Christmas—with or without Courfeyrac. Combeferre, in typical, diplomatic Combeferre fashion, had easily deflected her invitations and redirected the conversation to baking, which Combeferre had only dabbled in before, but was clearly good at. It would figure. Baking was a science and Combeferre had aced all his chemistry classes back during their undergrad.

Courfeyrac hoped that maybe this would mean he could talk Combeferre into baking his mom’s sugar cookies during the school year. Not that Combeferre really had spare time to be baking cookies for anyone, but Courfeyrac wasn’t above begging. Not for cookies. Besides, that was what boyfriends were supposed to do for each other, right? Bake cookies just because the other one asked?

A chill swept over Courfeyrac as he realized his mistake. Combeferre _wasn’t_ his boyfriend. They were good friends—the best of friends, really—but that was it. Friends. Full stop. Combeferre had only agreed to this mad charade in the first place because Courfeyrac had been desperate and Combeferre was something of a saint. He had no right to expect anything more than friendship with Combeferre after this week—and he felt guilty and anxious all at once that part of him even entertained the idea of carrying on this charade longer. He had years of experience to know that he couldn’t do relationships. It always got to the point where his partner expected more of him than he was willing to give. Always. He was wrong to try and trap Combeferre in a relationship like that—even if it was just a passing thought—and it was wrong to think that he could have a relationship without sex.

He had learned that lesson well enough.

But this was nice. It was so nice. To share this part of his life someone. He’d never taken any of his romantic partners home to meet his mom, had even stopped talking about them to his mom after his junior year of college when it became apparent that she didn’t think marrying at twenty was too young. He didn’t want to get her hopes up. But Combeferre fit in his family so nicely—perfectly, really. And Combeferre had gone above and beyond in this whole fake boyfriend thing to begin with. He was warm and affectionate and every time he touched Courfeyrac, Courfeyrac wanted to melt into the sensation. He’d always enjoyed physical and even sensual touching, but too many people couldn’t understand that he wanted that without it becoming sexual so he’d stopped accepting touch at all.

But that wasn’t quite true. It couldn’t be quite true, because he was still fairly physically affectionate with Jehan. For whatever reason, the combination of Courfeyrac’s romantic asexuality and Jehan’s aromantic sexuality left them in a position where they were perfectly comfortable with each other. They were operating on opposite ends of the spectrum, but Jehan understood Courfeyrac instinctively in ways that most other people struggled to grasp even after Courfeyrac explained it to them. When Courfeyrac felt lonely, he sought Jehan out, knowing that he was going to get some cuddles and probably some tea and that he’d walk away feeling a bit better and more relaxed, but likely covered in cat hair. Their relationship was purely platonic and Courfeyrac liked that.

But it was different with Combeferre. Combeferre’s affection and attention didn’t make him feel relaxed or merely content, it made him feel safe and strong. It made him feel like he could fly and—oh, fuck.

His realization must have shown on his face, because Combeferre wiped the flour off his hands on his apron (a “flirty” apron with blue ruffles around the edges that Courfeyrac had gotten his mom as a gag gift years and years ago) and he brushed the hair out of Courfeyrac’s eyes. “You okay?” he asked.

“What?” Stupid, stupid thing to say.

“For a second there, you looked like you just watched a dog get hit by truck,” he said.

Courfeyrac forced himself to laugh, not caring that it probably sounded fake and that Combeferre could probably see right through him. “I just realized I forgot to mail in the electric bill,” he said. “I’m gonna go call Jehan to see if he can take care of it for me.”

“Okay,” Combeferre says. “First batch of cookies will be out in a couple of minutes, so don’t take too long.” He leaned in for a quick kiss—perfect Combeferre, always keeping up appearances for the public—and Courfeyrac pretended that his heart didn’t stutter at the gesture.

Safely in his bedroom, Courfeyrac put his back against the wall and sank to the ground. Well, he was thoroughly and properly screwed. He fished his phone out of his pocket and dialed Jehan’s number.

Jehan picked up on the third ring. “Prouvaire’s House of Grading Horrors,” he said. It sounded like he’d had more than one glass of wine tonight. “How can I help you?”

“Grading?” Courfeyrac asked. “I thought your class was doing state testing this week.”

“They are,” Jehan said. “But I scheduled it so that their big end-of-the-year paper would be due before testing so afterwards we could waste time watching _The Lion King_ because it’s really just an adaptation of _Hamlet_ , when really we all know that’s just something English teachers say so they have a reason to watch _The Lion King_ in class. Little did I know, though, that my students really could have benefited from the extra time.” He gave a strange sort of laugh, almost a choking noise. “Courfeyrac, I just read a five page paper about the oppression of white men in _To Kill a Mockingbird_. Five pages! And I can’t even give the kid points for proper MLA formatting!”

“How about this,” Courfeyrac said. “We can switch places. I’ll do all your gross grading, and you can come take my place here.”

“Are things going that poorly?” Jehan asked. His voice sounded noticeably more grounded. “I thought Combeferre would be a good fake boyfriend for you.”

“He’s a little too good,” Courfeyrac said, resting his head back against the wall. “Shit, Jehan, I think I’m falling in love with him.”

There was silence on the other line, then, “Oh, Courfeyrac.”

“I know, I know, this is a fucking mess,” he said. “It’s not my fault he’s so fucking perfect.”

“Have you…have you talked to him about this?”

“And say what?” Courfeyrac wanted to know. “Hey, Combeferre, I know we’ve been fake dating for three days, but I think I might be falling in love with you and would really like to turn this fake dating into real dating, if you don’t mind. But oh, wait, we’re still not going to have sex. Sorry, not sorry?”

“Or you could tell him that the fake dating is playing with your emotions a little and that you want to set better boundaries,” Jehan suggested. “Or you could say that you didn’t realize that you two would make such a nice couple until you started fake dating and, if he feels the same way, you wouldn’t be opposed to giving this a shot.”

“Stop being so reasonable,” Courfeyrac said. “I just—I can’t, Jehan. I can’t do relationships anymore. I tried and every time was a failure. I can’t put myself through that again.”

“Are you worried that if Combeferre was interested in real dating, you’d run into the same problems you’ve had in the past?”

“Yes—no—fuck, I don’t know. I mean, I know Combeferre would never try to pressure me into anything. I mean, shit, he’s been willing to sleep on the floor the last two nights because he’s worried I’m uncomfortable sharing a bed with him, but—”

“You two are sharing a bed?”

“Yeah, it’s—it’s complicated,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, Combeferre will always want something out of a relationship that I don’t think I can give anymore!”

“Courfeyrac, if you’re really feeling this anxious about it, you need to talk to him,” Jehan said. “Tell him you need to set up better boundaries for the rest of the week. You don’t even have to tell him why, if you don’t want to. You know he won’t pry if you don’t offer up the information.”

“Yeah, because he’s perfect.”

“Would you rather I talk to him? Because I will for you. You know that. I can explain about Chri—”

“No,” Courfeyrac said. He had his reasons for keeping his secrets. To unearth them now—well, that was drama that none of them were currently equipped to deal with.

“Are you sure?”

Courfeyrac nodded. “I’ll figure it out,” he said. “It’ll be fine. I just need to…not be in love with him anymore.”

Jehan sighed—and communicated in that simple noise just what a bad idea he thought not talking about this with Combeferre really was—but he didn’t push the issue. “If you need to talk about this,” he said. “You can call me. Anytime. I’ll keep my phone on me at work and I’ll step out of class if you need me.”

“I’ll be fine,” Courfeyrac said. “You don’t need to worry.”

“I think I’ll worry anyway,” he said. “Good luck with everything and take care of yourself, Courfeyrac. I don’t want to see you get hurt again.”

After he hung up the phone, Courfeyrac stayed in his room for several long minutes. He felt better now that he’d gotten some of his anxiety of his chest—Jehan was always good for that. And Jehan was also always good for imparting unintentional bits of insight. Courfeyrac thought maybe it was a poet thing. Because Jehan’s question about whether or not he worried he’d have the same problems with Combeferre that he’d had in his other relationships made him realize something.

He trusted Combeferre in a way that he hadn’t trusted anyone in _years_. He trusted Combeferre not to overstep any of the physical boundaries they’d set for themselves. He trusted Combeferre with his body.

And maybe, just maybe, it’d be okay to trust him with his heart, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, folks! If you're braving the snow and the cold, please stay safe and warm! (It's freezing where I am and I wouldn't wish that on any of you.) The next chapter will be up on Saturday. Until then, feel free to come say hi on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	8. Interlude

**April, Three Years Ago**

Freshman year, Combeferre had hit it off with Enjolras immediately. After the initial shuffle of roommates had been taken care of and Enjolras and Combeferre ended up in the same room, it had taken about one hour of conversation before Combeferre realized he wanted his roommate as a best friend—and over the years, that had happened. Enjolras made him feel alive and made him feel passionate, made him want to change the world, and everyone said that he balanced Enjolras out. He provided stability to Enjolras’s wild passion. It was a balanced friendship and it worked, but you couldn’t become friends with Enjolras without also becoming friends with Courfeyrac.

Combeferre didn’t like to admit this to himself, but his initial perceptions of Courfeyrac had been wrong. Completely wrong. They had roomed together for two weeks at the beginning of their freshman year—back when Enjolras and Grantaire had been rooming together and their floor was liable to erupt in vicious shouting matches at two in the morning—and Courfeyrac had seemed…well, he’d seemed like a party boy. The sort of kid who’d be more at home in a frat house than in the dorms. He was loud and he was always flirting with someone. He never seemed to sleep but still managed to have endless energy. He was exhausting to be around—and because he was exhausted, Combeferre hadn’t bothered to look past Courfeyrac’s exuberant exterior.

But then he’d made friends with Enjolras and Enjolras just about refused to do anything without Courfeyrac—and Combeferre saw a different side of Courfeyrac. And, to be fair, this was the greater and more substantial side of Courfeyrac. He saw the parts of Courfeyrac that were just as passionate and intelligent and articulate as Enjolras. He saw how much Courfeyrac was driven by his compassion and his heart. He saw how Courfeyrac never refused to do someone a favor, no matter how burdensome or inconvenient. He saw how Courfeyrac could read people on emotional level and how he always knew just what his friends needed from him.

Combeferre had no idea how he had missed all that—but he was glad that he saw it eventually, because if he considered Enjolras his best friend, then Courfeyrac was…well, Courfeyrac was his other best friend. Enjolras was the friend he turned to for intellectual stimulation and shared causes, but Courfeyrac did all of that and more. Courfeyrac was the one he turned to at the end of a hard day, when he was exhausted and 100% done with everyone’s shit. Courfeyrac was the one he sought out when he had relationship problems and also when he had relationship triumphs—because as much as Courfeyrac liked to be there to console his friends, Combeferre knew that Courfeyrac liked it more when he could celebrate with his friends instead. Courfeyrac was his confidant, his emotional support.

Everyone deserved a Courfeyrac in their life, and Combeferre considered himself blessed beyond measure to have his friendship.

Especially since having Courfeyrac as a friend meant that there were two people to take care of Enjolras. Two people to balance him out and keep him from getting overzealous. Two people to keep him grounded and to restrain his vision and his passion into small, workable feats. Two people to bully him into eating and sleeping when he was caught up in something. Two people to diffuse the tension between Enjolras and Grantaire. Two people to pick Enjolras up from the police station—if they weren’t both locked up with him. Two people to wait for Enjolras when he was in the Emergency Room—again—because he’d gotten into another fight with some bigot who didn’t know when to shut up.

Which is where they were now.

“Sorry I’m late,” Courfeyrac said, collapsing into a seat next to Combeferre. His face was flushed, as though he had run here. “What is it this time? Broken bones? Internal bleeding? External bleeding? Please tell me he doesn’t need stitches again.”

“No stitches needed,” Combeferre said, “but apparently his chest is pretty bruised and at least one of his ribs is broken. The doctors are worried about internal damages.”

Courfeyrac hissed in sympathy. “They’re going to need to do an x-ray for that, aren’t they?”

“A CAT scan, actually.”

“Good thing he’s finished with exams, then, yeah?” Courfeyrac said. “Imagine having to take tests with that sort of pain.”

“As though being done with exams is going to slow him down at all.”

“I’m okay with drugging him up so he can’t move if you are.”

Combeferre laughed. “We can drug his coffee. He’ll never notice.” He covered a yawn with his hand—his own finals schedule was wearing on him—and asked, “Are you done with finals then? I was worried that you were in the middle of one when I called.”

“Oh, no. I finished yesterday. Christopher and I were out celebrating the end of finals when you called,” Courfeyrac said. His grin was wide and his eyes bright.

“Things going well, then?” he asked. Courfeyrac had met Christopher about a month ago while volunteering at a booth on campus handing out pamphlets of health resources for the LGBT community and the two of them had hit it off immediately. And Combeferre was happy for him. Courfeyrac was at his best when he had someone to love—romantically or not—and there was always room in Courfeyrac’s heart for just one more friend, just one more romantic partner. His capacity for love was endless. Courfeyrac had been hesitant around Christopher in the beginning, had been reluctant to show so much affection so fast because he had a history of people misconstruing what he meant by that affection. By now, Courfeyrac had been hurt enough times that he was trying to be careful.

It hurt, sometimes, watching Courfeyrac trying to be so careful around other people when his natural instincts were urging him to do differently. Combeferre hoped that one day Courfeyrac would find someone who would love him in the way he deserved to be loved—without demands and without reservations.

“They’re wooooooooonderful, Ferre,” he said, grinning brightly. “We’re officially dating now.”

“You are? Congratulations!”

“Thanks,” he said. He was a little breathless and Combeferre wondered just how long Courfeyrac had been waiting to tell one of his friends this. “And the best part is—he already knows.”

“Knows what?”

“About me,” Courfeyrac said. “And my ace-ness or whatever. We were talking about maybe being exclusive and taking things to the next level and I just flat out told him that I’m asexual.”

“And what’d he say?”

“Well, he didn’t get it at first,” Courfeyrac said, rolling his eyes a little. “But that’s nothing new. Fuck, I’ve had that conversation with so many people by now that I can anticipate their questions—asexual? Isn’t that a plant thing? So does your…you know…does it work?—seriously, you’d think people could be a bit more creative, but I just explained to him what it meant to me and that I’m just not interested in sex and that if we were going to date, I needed to know up front that he was okay with that.”

“And he was?”

“It was perfect, Ferre. He was perfect. He told me that he didn’t really understand it and that he would love to share that kind of intimacy—he called it intimacy, not fucking or sex or anything, isn’t that cute?—with me, but only if I wanted to. He said he didn’t ever want to do anything that would make me feel uncomfortable and that he hoped we could talk more about this later because he wanted to understand where I was coming from.”

“That’s great, Courfeyrac. I’m so happy for you.”

Courfeyrac smiled and ducked his head. “I think…I think this is going to work out this time.”

Combeferre reached over and squeezed his hand. “I hope it will. You deserve this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, folks! Next chapter will be up on Wednesday and until then, feel free to come say hi over on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	9. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for some unwanted touching and some really creepy talking

After an entire night of bar hopping, Grantaire actually felt relieved that the last stop for the evening was just a run-of-the-mill gay dance club. Nathan’s best man—a man who’d look more comfortable in a suit than in jeans and a t-shirt and who was also the sort of straight man who probably believed all sorts of weird shit about “the gay lifestyle” which clearly showed in his selection of bars and clubs tonight—had deliberately chosen the most utterly ridiculous bars for them to hit over the course of the night. More than one of which Nathan looked distinctly uncomfortable at.

But this place was standard. This was like any number of clubs Courfeyrac used to drag Grantaire to during their undergrad. Courfeyrac always went for the dancing and Grantaire came for the drinks. Coming to this place—well, it was almost like coming home. The beat of the music was familiar and Grantaire watched Courfeyrac subconsciously start swaying to the music as soon as they entered.

Grantaire was utterly unsurprised to find that Enjolras looked just as grumpy _here_ as he did at any number of places over the night. Which was fine, really, it was. He should have expected it, anyway. Enjolras had spent all of last night grumbling about how much he _wasn’t_ looking forward to this bachelor party and how he felt about the commodification of sex and who knew what else. But Grantaire had hoped—he had really hoped—that Enjolras would have perked up a little for _him_. He’d squeezed himself into the tightest jeans he owned and wore that green shirt that Enjolras normally couldn’t keep his hands off of because he’d been deluded enough to think that if he looked good enough for his boyfriend than maybe his boyfriend would pay attention to him instead of propping up bars all night.

He knew Enjolras wasn’t a bar hopping kind of guy, but he also knew full well that Enjolras could let loose every once in a while and Grantaire wanted that for tonight. He was sick of constantly second-guessing himself and of the nasty little voices in his head that kept telling him that Enjolras was ashamed of him, that Enjolras was embarrassed by him, that Enjolras didn’t think Grantaire was worthy of being part of his family. He thought if he could just get Enjolras to _just pay attention_ for a night then all of that would go away.

Only he found that he _wasn’t_ enough to get Enjolras’s mind off some stupid spat with his sister. Enjolras hardly looked at him all night. His eyes didn’t linger the way they normally did when Grantaire took the effort to force himself into these damn pants (which, thank you very much, he only kept because he knew how much Enjolras liked them). With every bar, Grantaire could hold back the hurt from Enjolras’s blatant disinterest less and less. So he started drinking—not enough for it to be dangerous, but enough that he noticed Enjolras’s disapproving looks with every ordered drink—and he started flirting with other men when they appreciated the effort it took for him to squeeze into these damn pants. If Enjolras wasn’t going to pay attention to him willingly, then he’d make him jealous. He’d get the attention of every single man in this stupid club—and hell, it looked like there were some straight girls here too, he’d get their attention as well—and he’d show Enjolras just how desirable he really was. He’d show Enjolras that other people found him worthy of their attention, of their affection.

He’d show him.

“Well,” Courfeyrac said after he surveyed the scene. Nathan and the other groomsmen were already heading towards the dance floor. “I don’t about you gents, but I want me one of those pretty little cocktails.”

“Are you sure you haven’t had enough to drink already?” Combeferre asked.

“My dear Combeferre, I am barely even buzzed.” He took Combeferre’s hand and flung his free arm out towards the bar. “To the bar, comrades! Taire, bring Lord Grumpy Pants with you and we’ll tear up the town.”

“He’s had too much to drink,” Enjolras said even as Grantaire steered him towards the bar.

“He’s enjoying himself,” Grantaire said. “Isn’t that what you’ve wanted all week?” Courfeyrac and Combeferre were already at the bar and Courfeyrac was practically sitting in Combeferre’s lap. It’d been ages since he last saw Courfeyrac act like this. “He’s acting like himself for a change, and if it only took him a couple drinks to get there, then you shouldn’t complain.”

“Getting drunk isn’t the way to deal with your problems.”

“Yeah, thanks, Enjolras. I actually knew that already.”

“I didn’t mean—whatever. Do what you want.”

“Gladly.”

Courfeyrac waved them over. “You have to try this, Taire,” he said, thrusting his drink towards Grantaire and succeeding in slopping most of it onto the floor. “It’s amaaaaaazing.”

Grantaire took the glass from him before he could lose any more of it and Combeferre chuckled at Courfyerac’s antics as he sipped at his beer. It was hard to watch Courfeyrac and Combeferre together—it’d been hard all night—because they looked and acted like a proper couple. Once Courfeyrac had loosened up enough to flirt and tease like he used to, Combeferre had taken it all in stride and even reciprocated it. He was more reserved than Courfeyrac, of course, but he was affectionate and flirty in his own right. They hadn’t stopped touching all night and it was impossible to miss the affection that Combeferre looked at Courfeyrac with.

It was hard not to be jealous of the attention they gave each other when Grantaire’s _actual_ boyfriend only spoke to him to nag him about drinking.

Grantaire quickly downed the rest of Courfeyrac’s drink, enjoying the warmth that it seemed to fill him with, before setting the glass back down. He grabbed Courfeyrac’s wrist and tugged him away from Combeferre.

Courfeyrac laughed and braced himself against Grantaire to keep himself upright.

“Do you remember this song?” Grantaire asked.

He laughed again. “This is the song that played at the thing with that dude! I loooooooove this song!”

“Come dance with me,” Grantaire said. He knew he’d never get Enjolras on the dance floor—he’d already tried tonight—and maybe keeping Courfeyrac away from Combeferre would keep him from getting jealous over his friends’ fake relationship.

Courfeyrac hesitated for a moment, surveying the tightly packed crowd on the dance floor, but then he laughed again. “Oh, all right,” he said and he allowed Grantaire to pull him out to the dance floor.

~*~*~

Between the booze and the pulsing music and the heat of bodies, Courfeyrac forgot himself. He forgot that his pounding heart had more to do with the press of bodies against his than it did with the physical exertion of dancing. He forgot that he should be worried at how much Grantaire had been drinking tonight—not because Grantaire would do anything untoward but because Grantaire only drank like that these days when he was in pain. He forgot all manner of unpleasant things, including that he wasn’t supposed to be in love with the man still sitting at the bar.

After all, today had gone so well. Before the bachelor party, he and Combeferre had gone to visit his mom at work for lunch and they had held hands and his mom had introduced Combeferre to all her co-workers as “my son’s charming boyfriend” and it felt right when Combeferre had put his arms around his shoulders or kissed him when Courfeyrac opened doors for him.

Today had felt like being in a real, proper relationship and maybe he was right to think that he and Combeferre could make this work as a real relationship instead of just a fake one.

He and Grantaire had been dancing for a couple of songs when Courfeyrac felt someone’s hand on his hip from behind him. He jolted, unsettled that someone would touch him so casually, until he heard Combeferre’s voice in his ear.

“Mind if I cut in?” Combeferre asked.

“He’s your…boyfriend,” Grantaire said, stepping away a little to make room for Combeferre. Courfeyrac grabbed Grantaire’s wrist before he could go too far in a silent invitation to stay with them. He didn’t think Combeferre would mind. Besides, the dance floor was crowded enough that there wasn’t much of an illusion that only two people were dancing together.

There was the added bonus that Courfeyrac felt better—safer—when he knew the people on either side of him. Grantaire and Combeferre kept a polite distance from him instead of grinding up against him like any number of strangers had already during the night.

“Has anyone told you you’ve got pretty eyes?” Courfeyrac asked Combeferre mid-way through the next song, pressing their bodies closer so Combeferre could hear him.

“What?”

“You’ve got beautiful eyes,” Courfeyrac said again. “And I think you could beat the moon in a pretty contest.”

Combeferre laughed. “Just how drunk are you?”

“M not drunk,” he said. “I feel alive!” He threw his head back, knocking off his balance enough that Combeferre had to wrap an arm around his waist to keep him from toppling right onto Grantaire.

“I’m glad,” Combeferre said. “I’m not into necrophilia. The cadavers in the anatomy lab never did it for me.”

“You’re pretty _and_ you’re funny. It’s not fair for you to be perfect.”

“I’m hardly perfect.”

Courfeyrac shook his head. “Yes, you are. You’re perfect.” He wrapped his arms around Combeferre’s neck so he could pull him down for a kiss. “Every inch of you is perfect,” he said, pressing butterfly kisses to Combeferre’s face.

Combeferre laughed and tried to pull away, but Courfeyrac held fast and leaned in to kiss Combeferre properly. They hadn’t had a proper kiss yet, just chaste pecks to appease everyone who thought that they were dating, but Courfeyrac wanted a real kiss, one with emotion and life and love behind. No more grandma kisses.

He was a little surprised when Combeferre didn’t immediately pull away from the kiss. Instead, he deepened it and they moved with each other perfectly as though their bodies had been designed to fit together like this. When Courfeyrac opened his mouth in an eager invitation for Combeferre’s tongue, he felt Combeferre practically shiver against him.

Combeferre tasted amazing, something like alcohol and chocolate, but when Courfeyrac hummed against his mouth, Combeferre abruptly pulled back.

“What?” Courfeyrac asked.

Combeferre’s pupils were wide. “Let’s not let things get too heated,” he said.

Confused and wanting to go back to kissing—it’d been so long he’d forgotten how much he liked proper kissing—he pressed himself against Combeferre.

He jerked back almost immediately when he felt Combeferre’s hard cock against his hip.

Obviously, that was what Combeferre had meant by things getting too heated, and for a second, Courfeyrac felt panic flare up in his chest because he’d been in this situation before. He’d been with other men who’d gotten aroused while kissing and they always expected Courfeyrac to do something about the problem.

Combeferre watched him with concerned eyes. “It’s okay,” he said, loud enough to be heard over the music. “I don’t need anything from you.”

He hesitated for a moment—that’s not what anyone else had ever told him in this situation—but this was Combeferre and he could trust Combeferre. He forced himself to relax and pressed closer against Combeferre, leaving just enough space so their hips weren’t touching.

“Are you okay?” Combeferre asked.

“I trust you,” he said. “Besides, I like kissing you.”

“We’ve just got to take it easy,” Combeferre said before leaning in to kiss him again.

This kiss was less passionate than before, but still better than any of the pecks they’d traded this week. His heart pounded in his chest because he wasn’t quite sure why Combeferre was kissing him now. Previously, all their kisses had been a show— _Look how well adjusted I am, Mom!_ —but there was no reason for Combeferre to feel like he needed to perform like that now. Courfeyrac didn’t think anyone from the bachelor party was going to report back to his mother. Courfeyrac had kissed Combeferre because he had wanted to and maybe…maybe Combeferre was kissing him now because he wanted to, too. Maybe Combeferre kissed him because he liked kissing him.

Maybe their strange little romance wasn’t doomed.

The giddy rush of hope Courfeyrac felt made him giggle against Combeferre’s mouth.

Combeferre pulled back again. “Am I that bad at kissing?”

“You taste like chocolate,” Courfeyrac told him.

Courfeyrac was about to lean up for another kiss—he and Combeferre shouldn’t have stopped kissing in the first place, how had he forgotten how much he _adored_ kissing—when Nathan practically barreled into them.

“Combeferre,” he said, slightly breathless, “you’re in med school, right?”

Combeferre nodded. “Is something wrong?”

“With Blake,” he said. “My best man. I don’t know. Maybe he just drank too much, but he can’t stop puking and I just need to be sure he’s going to be okay. He’s my best friend, you know?”

“Yeah, of course,” Combeferre said. “I’ll take a look at him. Fey, will you be—”

“I’ll be fine,” Courfeyrac said. He’d be more than fine. He was feeling better than he had in ages. “You go save lives.”

Combeferre smiled at him and leaned in for a chaste kiss before vanishing into the crowd with Nathan. Courfeyrac turned, looking for Grantaire, only to discover that he’d lost Grantaire sometime after Combeferre had shown up. That was just as well. He didn’t need to hear any third-degree over the way he and Combeferre had been kissing. Grantaire had probably gone back to the bar to be with Enjolras. Courfeyrac would go meet them there. He was thirsty anyway.

Only then he saw Enjolras cutting through the crowd on the dance floor—it was impossible to mistake Enjolras, even as crowded as it was here—and it was clear Enjolras was on the warpath. Courfeyrac followed his trajectory with his eyes and spotted Grantaire, clearly flirting and dancing with two other men.

“Shit,” Courfeyrac said and began to shove his way through the crowd. This could very well be the end of Enjolras-and-Grantaire if someone wasn’t there to moderate.

Despite the thick press of bodies, Courfeyrac managed to trip over someone’s feet but before he was dumped on his ass, someone’s arm wrapped around his waist and hoisted him to his feet. But once he was on his feet, the arm didn’t let go from his waist, no matter how Courfeyrac pressed at it. He felt someone nuzzle at his hair.

“Woah, dude,” Courfeyrac said, loud enough that he’s sure whoever was grabbing him heard. “Back off, yeah?”

“With an ass like yours, I’d fuck you on all fours,” he said, one hand descending to grope Courfeyrac’s ass. “You got a name, baby?”

“Yeah, fuck you!”

“You promise?”

Courfeyrac’s stomach churned and his lungs felt tight. He clawed at the man’s arm, trying to get him to let go. “Seriously, asshole,” he said. “Let me the fuck go. I’ve got a fucking boyfriend.”

“Oh, that’s too bad, pretty boy,” the asshole said. “If you were single, I’d have you spread out naked on my bed and I’d fuck you senseless. You wouldn’t be able to walk straight for days.”

Did people actually think shit like that was attractive? Was it supposed to be some kind of turn on to have another person talk to you this way? Because Courfeyrac just felt sick and he felt terrified and he remembered all the people he’d been with who didn’t seem to care if his consent was less than enthusiastic and expected him to lie there and take what was given him because that’s what he was _supposed_ to like.

Panic descended on him and he could barely breathe and his hands trembled as he pushed against the man’s arm.

The man moaned and rubbed himself against Courfeyrac. “Does your boyfriend like how feisty you are, baby? I bet he gets off just watching you struggle beneath him.”

“Get your fucking hands off me!” He twisted in the man’s grip, trying to get some leverage to get away.

“And I bet you just love it when he holds you down and uses you like some fucking whore. Do you think he’ll let me watch, baby?”

Courfeyrac finally managed to twist out of the man’s grip and a whimper caught in his throat when he felt the man’s hand close around his arm. Courfeyrac spun around, using his momentum to slam the heel of his palm into the asshole’s nose before turning his back and running straight out of the club.

~*~*~

Enjolras watched Grantaire from his place at the bar. He’d declined Combeferre’s invitation to embark on the dance floor with him. Dancing wasn’t his thing. It wasn’t even close to being anything he could _call_ his thing. Writhing up against Grantaire was one thing—but doing that with an entire crowd of strangers was another matter entirely. He didn’t know why Grantaire seemed to like it so much—and he especially didn’t know why Courfeyrac liked it so much. Courfeyrac could barely stand to have his friends touch him these days—although today certainly seemed to be an exception with Combeferre—and Enjolras couldn’t help but think that Courfeyrac couldn’t possibly enjoy having strangers rub and grind up against him.

But Courfeyrac seemed pretty well preoccupied by Combeferre at the moment. Whatever anxiety he might have about being in a crowd like this, it certainly wasn’t an issue with Combeferre around. Grantaire, though, Grantaire was another matter. For a while, he’d been dancing with Combeferre and Courfeyrac and Enjolras had been fine with that. He knew there was nothing there. But now Grantaire was eagerly soaking up the attention of several men at once and he…he just didn’t get it. He didn’t. He didn’t know why Grantaire was acting like this. He didn’t know why Grantaire was ignoring him. He didn’t like dancing, but if Grantaire had pestered him a little more, he would have agreed to go out for at least a few songs. Grantaire knew that about him, knew that to get him to go along with anything you had to push him. But Grantaire had just given up on him and sought out the company of some else.

And it hurt because he knew he wasn’t the best person to go out clubbing with. He knew he had a bit of a stick up his ass (Courfeyrac had been telling him that from the time they were twelve), but that normally didn’t bother Grantaire. Grantaire liked spending time with him regardless.

Until now.

And he didn’t know why.

He knew Grantaire had hit a bit of a rough patch. It happened and he knew his boyfriend well enough that he recognized the rough patches easily. Part of him knew he should have expected it—the abrupt change in schedule, the pressure of making a good impression, the forced change in their sleep habits—all of those would put a strain on Grantaire and he was beginning to suspect that there was more going on with all that business about the webcomic than Grantaire told him and all of this was the perfect storm to set Grantaire over the edge. And that was fine. Bad days happened. Enjolras had committed to helping Grantaire through them in any way he could, but right now…it just felt like Grantaire didn’t even care, like he was feeding his own bad habits. This was, after all, the most Enjolras had seen him drink in ages. It scared him.

And he couldn’t help but think that he was the cause.

Maybe Grantaire didn’t like his family. Maybe Grantaire didn’t like the fact that Enjolras came from a cookie-cutter upper-middle class household when there had been times when Grantaire’s mother had struggled to feed him as a child. Maybe Grantaire thought he was stuck-up or boring or that dealing with his temper wasn’t worth it anymore.

He watched Grantaire laugh at something someone said—a full, hearty laugh. The sort of laugh that made him throw his head back and that he only ever did when he was amused by something that caught him by surprise. Enjolras was the cause of that laugh most often and he was surprised at how much it hurt to have Grantaire laugh like that for someone else. He shoved the hurt aside, not caring that anger swelled up in its place, and he marched onto the dance floor to demand answers from his boyfriend.

The dance floor was crowded, but Enjolras had plenty of experience in forcing his way through crowds at various protests and rallies. This was nothing different, although he did take a little better care to try not to step on anyone. When he reached Grantaire and the men, he grabbed Grantaire by the arm to get his attention.

“Whoa, pal,” one of the other men said. “Let’s not get grabby here.”

Enjolras ignored him. “What the hell are you playing at, Taire?”

“It’s called having fun, Enjolras,” he said.  “I’d suggest you’d try it sometime, but we both know you’re incapable of it.”

Enjolras shoved aside the hurt that welled inside him. He tugged on Grantaire’s arm. “I think we should leave now.”

Grantaire jerked his arm away. “Who said I want to go anywhere with you?”

“You’ve had too much to drink,” Enjolras said, catching Grantaire’s wrist. “Now let’s go.”

“Hey, buddy,” one of the men said. “He doesn’t want to go with you.”

“Yeah, who are you to tell him what to do?” the other said.

Enjolras gave them both a dirty look. “I’m his fucking boyfriend,” he said. “And he has a fucking drinking problem and I’d appreciate it if you’d both mind your own fucking business.”

“He didn’t say he was seeing anyone,” the first man said.

“Yeah, well, now you know.” He glared at the men until they left before he turned his attention back to Grantaire. “C’mon, Taire, let’s go.”

“I don’t want to go,” Grantaire said, twisting his wrist out of Enjolras’s grip. “I’m having fun!”

“Well, forgive me for not enjoying myself while I watch my boyfriend throw himself at anything that moves.”

“Oh, so now I’m your boyfriend!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You just seem really particular about when you’ll admit to having a boyfriend and when you won’t,” he snapped. “And I really don’t have the patience for those kinds of fucking head games.”

“What head games? Look, I’m sorry if you’re pissed that I haven’t been hanging off you all night, but you’re the one who left me back at the bar!”

“You know what? Fuck all this,” Grantaire said. “I’m getting another fucking drink.”

“Don’t you dare,” Enjolras said. “You’ve had enough tonight!”

“Are you my boyfriend or my mother?”

“I care about you, Grantaire!”

“Well, you have a funny way of showing it. You can find me at the bar.”

He turned on his heel and started to force his way through the crowd.

“Grantaire, wait!” he called after him.

He was about to follow when he heard a shout from a few feet away.

“Get your fucking hands off me!”

Courfeyrac’s voice.

Enjolras swore and turned in the direction of the voice just in time to see Courfeyrac slam his hand against some guy’s nose. The man dropped to the floor and Courfeyrac was already on his way out the bar.

Enjolras turned back to Grantaire, but he was too far away to call for help. He wanted to go after Grantaire, wanted to go figure out was festering between them, but he knew Courfeyrac needed someone right now and Combeferre was nowhere to be found.

“Fuck it all,” he said through clenched teeth and he chased after his oldest friend.

He found Courfeyrac just outside the bar, puking into the gutter along the side of the street.

“Courfeyrac, what happened?” he asked in a gentle voice as he approached.

Courfeyrac groaned before throwing up again. “I want to go home,” he said in a broken voice.

“All right,” Enjolras said. “I’ll text Grantaire and Combeferre and we can go home as soon as they get here.”

He pulled out his phone and sent a quick text to Grantaire and Combeferre, telling both that there was a bit of an emergency and they needed to go ASAP. He hoped Grantaire wasn’t pissed enough to ignore the message.

When Courfeyrac stopped puking, Enjolras put his hand on Courfeyrac’s back. “Are you okay?”

The way Courfeyrac flinched from his touch was answer enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, folks! To the Americans among you, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. The next chapter will be up on Saturday. Until then, feel free to say hello over on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	10. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for rape/non-con (non-graphic and non-violent)

**Spring-Fall, Three Years Ago**

Things with Christopher started off great. Better than great. Courfeyrac had a rather robust dating history—he loved dating, he loved relationships, he loved loving people—but he also had a long history of those relationships crashing and burning. It was inevitable, really. In today’s day and age, love and sex were inextricably intertwined and Courfeyrac couldn’t escape that. His romantic partners always hit a point where adding sex to the relationship was non-negotiable, and for a while, Courfeyrac had tried to accommodate. He’d been willing to have sex with his partners, had been willing to share his body with them because he understood that that’s how  _they_  communicated love. Sometimes, he even enjoyed having sex with them. He enjoyed the closeness that it brought to his relationships.

But after a while, it just got…old. After a while, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was somehow being disingenuous, that having sex when he really had no personal desire to do so made him some kind of liar. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his partners, of course he did, but whenever he started feeling uncomfortable and tried to gently suggest that he might feel better if they toned back the sex, at least for a little, then his partners felt hurt and angry and they’d start arguing and these arguments always ended in the same place.

_If you really loved me, you’d want to have sex with me!_

_I don’t understand why you’re so repulsed by me!_

_What’s wrong with you? I thought I was making you happy!_

Courfeyrac had learned that it was best to just break off the relationship when they escalated to that point. If his partner didn’t break up with him first, at least. He’d certainly been dumped on more than one occasion because he wasn’t willing to put out. (He had noticed over the years that it was normally his boyfriends who dumped him for not putting out. The girlfriends usually thought that there was something wrong with them—that they weren’t attractive enough or sexy enough to keep his interest, despite his constant reassurances that that wasn’t the case—but the guys almost always blamed  _him_  for not wanting sex.) Courfeyrac knew that these relationships would turn toxic if he allowed them to continue, and he was honestly more than a little worried what his friends would do if they perceived that any of his partners were trying to coerce him into having sex. Enjolras, in particular, had a sixth sense for when his relationships were about to turn toxic and was downright threatening to anyone he perceived as a threat to Courfeyrac’s well-being.

Which was flattering, he supposed, but it was hard to negotiate something as delicate as a break-up with Enjolras chomping at the bit in the background.

By the time Courfeyrac and Christopher met, Courfeyrac hadn’t been in a relationship with anyone in months and had quit clubbing and bar hopping with Grantaire all together. Grantaire was great about stepping in with assholes who got too grabby at the clubs, but Courfeyrac just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. He was sick of people automatically expecting sex from him just because he was dressed a certain way or dancing a certain way or at a certain club. He was sick of having people grinding themselves up against him, sick of these simulated sex routines that played out at every club he went to. He tried for a little while to date from a more religious or conservative pool, hoping to find the “good Christian girl” that his mom always hoped he’d marry who wouldn’t be so eager for sex outside of marriage and he was normally disappointed. There were girls who thought that the ban on pre-marital sex was just outdated and then there were the girls who thought that vaginal sex was out of the question but were willing to suck him off or let him fuck their asses, as though it were some sort of sex loophole, and then there were the girls who started talking about getting married after the second date and it was just too much work.

But then he’d met Christopher at the volunteer booth and he’d been smitten. Christopher was kind and smart and funny and handsome. He was thoughtful and understanding and after a month of going on dates and hanging out, Courfeyrac flat out told Christopher that he was asexual before he’d consent to making their relationship exclusive. He was sick of falling in love and letting his heart loose only to get broken and the accusations that he was a liar for keeping this from people. He needed to be upfront, so he was. He laid it all out. Sex wasn’t something he felt he could offer to the relationship anymore. After so many people accusing him of “holding sex hostage” or being emotionally manipulative for not wanting to put out, he wasn’t comfortable having sex at all and he didn’t know if he ever would be again, and he told Christopher as much.

And Christopher had been understanding and honest. The honesty was what Courfeyrac appreciated the most. Christopher admitted that he did want to have sex with Courfeyrac and that he didn’t really understand “this whole asexuality business” but that he respected Courfeyrac enough to not put him in that situation. He wanted them to be comfortable communicating their needs to each other. He didn’t want Courfeyrac to feel like he had to hide that part of himself or be ashamed of himself and he wanted to continue to have conversations like this to help him understand.

Courfeyrac nearly wanted to propose to him on the spot because finally— _finally_ —here was someone who understood. Here was someone who was kind and compassionate and who wasn’t going to vilify Courfeyrac for something that was beyond his control. He felt weightless after that conversation. He felt untouchable.

And he thanked Christopher for giving him that feeling.

For the whole summer, things were wonderful between them. They had the occasional argument, the occasional hiccup, and Christopher tended to get horny when he had too much to drink and he propositioned Courfeyrac once or twice, but he didn’t argue or fight or get angry when Courfeyrac turned him down. Courfeyrac felt safe around Christopher. He felt comfortable. He showed his love for his boyfriend in an endless barrage of thoughtful actions and caring cuddles. He wanted to make sure that Christopher never had a reason to doubt his devotion.

And Christopher never did. He met kindness with kindness and he basked in Courfeyrac’s attentions—and not even then did he try to pull sex into their relationship.

It was just after the start of the new semester at school that Courfeyrac suggested they bring more physical intimacy into their relationship.

“I’m not—I’m still not interested in  _sex_  sex,” he said over a quiet dinner in Christopher’s apartment one night. “Not anal or anything penetrative really, but, if it’s something you’d like, I’d be comfortable giving you hand jobs or things like that. Maybe not super frequently or anything, but it’s something I think I’d like to consider doing with you.”

They talked about it for hours, with Christopher checking and double checking that Courfeyrac really was comfortable with this. But this was something that Courfeyrac really wanted to do for his boyfriend. Relationships were about compromise and he’d had sex with people before. Hand jobs would be okay. He could handle hand jobs.

When he saw the expression on Christopher’s face later that night as he jerked him off, Courfeyrac was sure that he had made the right call.

It was a couple of weeks later that Christopher started suggesting other things he’d like the two of them to try, always with the caveat that he didn’t want to make Courfeyrac feel uncomfortable and that these weren’t conditions to continue dating and that he’d respect Courfeyrac’s answer.

Courfeyrac usually let himself be talked into whatever Christopher had in mind, even though he was never completely comfortable with the suggestions. Secretly he felt that it was one thing for him to bring up sexual activities for them to try seeing as how he was the one who had issues with it and he would be the one having to accommodate Christopher and not the other way around, but when Christopher brought it up…well, he was grateful that Christopher was open about what he wanted out of their relationship and really, Courfeyrac thought, he wasn’t asking for that much. In past relationships, Courfeyrac had done a lot more than what Christopher was suggesting.

_I just want to show you how much I love you, baby._

_I want to make you feel so good._

_This is how I show my love. I feel like I’m not doing enough for you._

That all changed the first time they had sex. The sex itself had been fine, as far as sex went. Christopher was certainly a more attentive partner than plenty of other people Courfeyrac had been with. (He’d dated a small selection of assholes who interpreted Courfeyrac’s asexuality to mean that Courfeyrac’s pleasure in the act was inconsequential and, during sex, treated him as little more than a means to an end. Those relationships lasted considerably shorter than the rest.) But Courfeyrac wasn’t really interested in having sex often—special occasion sex was okay, but he didn’t want more than that—and Christopher seemed to think that sex once meant having frequent sex.

Courfeyrac fell into a pattern of consenting about once out of every four times that Christopher suggested they go fool around in the bedroom, which translated to sex a little less than once a week. It was too much for Courfeyrac, but he saw the hurt in Christopher’s eyes whenever he said no and Christopher had been so supportive and so understanding. Courfeyrac felt that this was really the least he could do.

But he had a hard time relaxing during sex sometimes, which meant that no matter how much Christopher prepared him—and Christopher was always thorough and attentive and so careful—it still hurt, which meant that Courfeyrac’s body just began to associate sex with pain, which meant he had an even harder time relaxing.

Christopher, though, he was so happy. He looked so content and pleased with the turn their relationship had taken and he often told Courfeyrac how much it meant to him that Courfeyrac was willing to trust him like that.

Courfeyrac couldn’t take that away from him. He just couldn’t, he cared about Christopher too much.

But his reluctance to engage in sex manifested itself in other ways, even though Courfeyrac never said a word about it. He’d get nervous when he and Christopher cuddled together on the couch while watching a movie, because Christopher had a history of getting bored and letting his hands wander, so Courfeyrac would sit alone on the arm chair, away from Christopher. At night, when they shared a bed, he couldn’t sleep with Christopher touching him, even though he normally loved falling asleep in someone else’s arms. Every time Christopher reached out to touch him, Courfeyrac couldn’t help but worry that simple touching would escalate into something more, so he’d push Christopher’s hands away.

They started arguing more after that, but sex was never a part of the arguments. Christopher never hurled accusations at him that he was withholding sex to get what he wanted or that his reluctance to have sex was somehow a sign that he didn’t love Christopher. No, their arguments were far more mundane. Whose turn was it to cook or do up the dishes or arguing over canceled plans because of school or work. They were both busy. They both had other things going on. But this was the first time Courfeyrac had been in a relationship where the arguments weren’t centered around sex. He knew that couples argued and went through rough patches. This was normal and it wasn’t about sex. If it were about sex, he would have broken up with Christopher, even though that would have broken his own heart. But it wasn’t, which meant to him that their relationship was still working. It meant that there was still hope.

Until there wasn’t anymore.

Courfeyrac had woken up the morning after Thanksgiving to find his pajama pants and his underwear down around his knees. Christopher had his mouth around Courfeyrac’s cock and three fingers up his ass. Courfeyrac jerked back so bad he accidentally kicked Christopher in the crotch.

Or maybe it hadn’t been an accident.

He scrambled up the bed, trying to pull his pants up as he went. “What the hell were you doing?” he demanded.

Christopher doubled over on the bed. “Dammit, Courf!”

“What the  _hell_  were you doing?!”

“What did it look like? I was giving my boyfriend a fucking blow job!”

“When I was asleep?”

“It’s not like you weren’t already hard!”

“And that makes it okay?”

“Pretty much every guy I’ve ever been with likes getting woken up like this!”

“I didn’t want this!”

“I was going to wake you up before I made you come, Courf. You don’t need to—”

“I need you to leave.”

“What? Courf, I—”

“You need to leave.”

“I’m sorry. If I’d know, I wouldn’t have—”

“ _Please_ , Christopher, I need you to not be here right now.”

Christopher pulled back. “Okay,” he said. “Please call me later? So I know you’re okay? You have no idea how sorry I am. I didn’t think you’d mind this. I’m so sorry.”

Courfeyrac nodded. He just wanted Christopher to leave so he could feel like he could breathe again.

The first thing he did when Christopher was gone was lock the front door.

Then he fled to the bathroom where he was promptly sick.

He showered afterwards, scrubbing his skin harshly in too-hot water. Then he bundled up and walked the four blocks to Jehan’s apartment. He thought about going to Enjolras and Combeferre’s, but Combeferre had gone home for Thanksgiving and Enjolras was having drama with Grantaire and Courfeyrac didn’t want to be a burden. Besides, he had a key to Jehan’s apartment and he could let himself in. Once inside, it appeared that Jehan wasn’t awake yet, but his cat was prowling around the living room. Courfeyrac scooped the cat into his arms and collapsed on the couch.

Jehan emerged from his room within the hour and if he was surprised to find Courfeyrac on his couch, he didn’t mention it. He merely took one look at Courfeyrac and said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

Jehan nodded. “I’ll go make us some tea, then.”

“Can I have a hot chocolate instead?”

Jehan kissed the crown of his head and Courfeyrac tried not to tense under the touch. He was just on edge, that was all. Christopher…surprised him, and it hurt to have his trust betrayed liked that, but that hurt would go away. It had to. He loved Christopher. Jehan smiled at him. “Whatever you want,” he said.

Courfeyrac spent the day on Jehan’s couch, cuddling the cat and marathoning the first season of  _Downton Abbey_  on Netflix with Jehan. Jehan kept his distance and didn’t ask any prying questions, but his presence was comforting. Around the death of Mr. Pamuk in episode three, Courfeyrac pulled out his phone and texted Christopher.

**_[Courfeyrac]_ ** _Sorry I chased you out this morning. I was just...I was freaking out. Sorry._

Christopher’s response was almost immediate.

**_[Christopher]_ ** _I’m so glad you texted me. I was worried you wouldn’t want to see me again. Are you okay? I’m so sorry about this morning. I wasn’t thinking. I should have known you’d have  a problem with that._

**_[Courfeyrac]_ ** _I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have freaked out._

**_[Christopher]_ ** _No, baby. You have nothing to be sorry for. This was my fault. I know that I was wrong now, and I’m sorry_

**_[Christopher]_ ** _I wasn’t trying to hurt you. You know that, right? It’s just I know how tense you’ve been about this whole sex thing_

**_[Christopher]_ ** _and I know that sometimes you have trouble relaxing because you overthink things and I just thought if I could get us started when you were still asleep then you’d be relaxed and it’d be better for you_

**_[Courfeyrac]_ ** _I’m not okay with what you did. I’m still kind of freaked out._

**_[Christopher]_ ** _And you have every right to be. Seriously, you have no idea how awful I feel. I know we should have talked about it before I did anything._

**_[Christopher]_ ** _I was never trying to hurt you_

**_[Christopher]_ ** _I love you, baby, and I never meant to hurt you. Lots of people I’ve been with before never minded waking up like that and I know it was stupid of me to assume that you’d be okay with it too, but it was early and I wasn’t thinking._

**_[Christopher]_ ** _Please forgive me_

Courfeyrac stared at the text messages for a long time, grateful that Christopher was waiting for him to respond before texting again. He felt sick when he thought about that morning and he had no idea how comfortable he’d be with Christopher touching him, but he also took comfort in Christopher’s words. He was sorry. He knew he screwed up. He still loved Courfeyrac.

And Courfeyrac didn’t know if anyone would ever love him like Christopher did.

**_[Courfeyrac]_ ** _I forgive you. I think we need to slow things down a little, but I want to keep working at what we have. I love you._

He hesitated before he sent the message, unsure if he was making the right choice. When he finally sent the message—which was immediately followed by a message from Christopher professing his love and gratitude—Courfeyrac felt relieved. They were in this together. They could make this work.

He had no idea how toxic the relationship had the potential to get.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus we have the tragic tale of Christopher and Courfeyrac. The next chapter will be up on Wednesday, but until then, you're always welcome to come say hi on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	11. Chapter Six

Combeferre woke up the next morning with a slight hangover as his only companion. It didn’t look like Courfeyrac’s side of the bed had been slept in at all. Which was strange, because he could have sworn that Courfeyrac came to bed with him last night.

Hadn’t he?

Surely he wasn’t drunk enough last night to forget that.

Maybe Courfeyrac had woken up and was in the shower. Maybe he made his side of the bed before he left the room.

Maybe Courfeyrac didn’t feel comfortable sharing a bed last night after whatever happened at the club.

Combeferre sighed and rolled out of bed. He felt guilty for leaving Courfeyrac like he had last night, but Courfeyrac hadn’t seemed to mind at the time and Blake, the best man, had just passed out in his own puke. Combeferre didn’t have it in him not to help in a situation like that.

It was early enough in the morning—Combeferre was always an early riser, hangover or no—and he hoped that maybe he could track Courfeyrac down before Diane woke up. He hoped maybe they’d have time to talk alone.

The kitchen was empty when Combeferre got downstairs, but the lights were all on and the coffee pot was on. He could hear Courfeyrac’s mom talking from the living room.

“Did you sleep on the couch?” she asked.

Courfeyrac’s reply was muffled.

“Is everything okay? Did you and Combeferre argue last night?” Before Courfeyrac even had the chance to answer, she kept talking. “Darling, things will work out. You two are so good together and you’re so happy with him!”

“We didn’t fight,” Courfeyrac said. Combeferre heard the rustle of fabric and the groan of couch springs. “Everything’s fine. I just…we just…we were both a little drunk and I didn’t want us getting carried away.”

It didn’t take much of an effort for Combeferre to translate that. Combeferre had been drunk last night and Courfeyrac was afraid that Combeferre would get carried away. On the one hand, it hurt that Courfeyrac would make that kind of assumption. Combeferre had never given him a reason to think he was even capable of something like that. But on the other hand, Combeferre knew that Courfeyrac probably had a reason to distrust his sleeping partners when they were drunk. Knowing that Courfeyrac had probably been hurt like that stung worse than the idea that his friend didn’t trust him.

“Oh, darling,” Diane said, “I appreciate your concern, but I understand that you’re an adult. It’s okay if you and Combeferre get carried away here. Personally, I think it’s a little silly of Gemma to be keeping Enjolras and his boyfriend apart at this stage—especially with how long they’ve been dating—but I don’t want you to feel like your sexuality is something you need to hide here. I mean, I certainly appreciate you keep things behind closed doors—as I’m sure you’ve appreciated me and my various boyfriends doing the same—”

“Mom!” Courfeyrac said, alarmed.

“But our sexuality and our desire to be with people in that intimate sort of way, well, it’s part of God’s plan for us. Man wasn’t made to be alone and God wants us to be able to share our whole selves with people—that’s what it means to become one flesh. I have met plenty of people who act like sex is some dirty, shameful thing, but I never want you to feel that way. I don’t want you to be ashamed of what your body wants. It’s _normal_ to get carried away sometimes. You didn’t have to hide away on the couch.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Courfeyrac said. He sounded weary and Combeferre’s heart went out to him. His mom was trying to be reassuring, but by trying to normalize sexual desire, she had inadvertently shamed Courfeyrac’s lack of it.

“Why don’t you come to the kitchen with me and we can get breakfast started for when that charming boyfriend of yours wakes up?”

Combeferre quickly retreated to the staircase, where he’d be hidden from view. He wasn’t sure how comfortable Courfeyrac would be if he knew Combeferre had overheard all of this, and really all he wanted at this point was to make Courfeyrac feel better. He waited until the smell of eggs frying wafted up the stairs before he came down again, yawning as though he’d just woken up.

Diane welcomed him with a wide smile and a kiss on the cheek and assured him that the coffee was just about done. “You two certainly look like you need it!”

Combeferre took a seat at the island next to Courfeyrac, and it was obvious that Courfeyrac hadn’t slept well—if he’d slept at all. There were dark circles under his eyes, which were a little bloodshot. Combeferre wondered if that was from the drinking last night or if he’d been crying. He reached over to gently scratch Courfeyrac’s scalp, but pulled away when Courfeyrac tensed under his touch.

“Is everything okay?” he asked quietly, keeping his eyes on Diane to make sure she wasn’t eavesdropping.

“Yeah,” Courfeyrac said. “Everything’s fine.”

“Are you sure? Do you want to talk about last night?”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Courfeyrac said. He met Combeferre’s eyes for a fraction of a second before looking away. His eyes lacked their usual spark and he hadn’t looked this despondent since the end of his relationship with Christopher. “I think I’m going to go take a shower,” he announced.

“Breakfast is almost ready,” Diane said.

“I’m not hungry,” Courfeyrac said, getting to his feet. “Maybe I’ll feel up to it after I shower.”

Diane looked concerned, and Combeferre didn’t blame her. He was concerned too.

“Well,” she said. “Don’t take too long. We’re setting up the activity hall at the church in the afternoon  for the reception, okay?”

“Yeah,” Courfeyrac said. “Not a problem.”

When he was gone, Combeferre was almost certain that Diane would give him the third degree about Courfeyrac’s mood, but she seemed too preoccupied to bother with questions. She put a plate of fried eggs and toast in front of Combeferre and they ate together in silence. When they heard the water turn off upstairs, she turned to him and said, “Why don’t you go check on him, dear? I think he’d respond better to you than to his prying mother.”

Combeferre headed upstairs and knocked on the bathroom door. “Fey?” he called.

Courfeyrac opened the door and steam flooded out of the room. Just how hot had that shower been?

Judging by the red tint of his skin, too hot.

“Did Mom send you after me?” he asked. “She always does that whenever I get upset about something. She doesn’t like hearing what’s gotten me in a snit, so she always sent Enjolras or his dad after me to find out what’s wrong.”

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

Courfeyrac shook his head.

“Fey, we’ve been friends for years,” he said. “You can talk to me. I’m sorry for leaving you at the club last night, but Blake was in bad shape—”

“This has nothing to do with you leaving, okay?” Courfeyrac said. “I just…I’m allowed to not be a big ray of sunshine all the time, aren’t I?”

“Of course you are.”

“And just because I’m not bright and chipper doesn’t mean that something’s wrong.”

“Okay,” Combeferre said. “I was just checking. I was worried about you. I know this whole week hasn’t been easy for you, and I just wanted to make sure that you knew that I’m here for you.”

Some sort of emotion crossed Courfeyrac’s face, too quickly for Combeferre to interpret it. “I’ll be fine, okay?” Courfeyrac said. “I just…I just need to clear my head a bit.”

“Okay.”

“I should get dressed,” Courfeyrac said with a bit of a smile. Combeferre could tell it was forced. “If you’re lucky, there might be some hot water left.”

~*~*~

Courfeyrac was in trouble…and he knew it. Things with Combeferre had been good—so good—last night, even if he did panic about Combeferre’s obvious arousal for a little bit, but he felt safe with Combeferre. He always did. But then Combeferre had left and there’d been that grabby asshole who acted like every other grabby asshole Courfeyrac had ever met at a club. And no one had grabbed him like that since Christopher, and he had been doing his best to avoid having people call him things like a _cocktease_ and he’d been doing _so fucking well_ until it all came crashing down and then the next thing he knew, he was puking up his guts outside the club. (A small part of him was rather proud that he managed to get outside the club before vomiting. He thought he should get some sort of credit for that.)

He’d tried to go to bed with Combeferre last night, hadn’t wanted to do anything that would cause a scene or make anyone worry even more about him, but he couldn’t relax knowing that there was another person in bed with him. That was what it’d been like in the last month of his relationship with Christopher. He had tried so hard to be normal and to share a bed with his boyfriend, but he hadn’t been able to trust him after Thanksgiving. He didn’t feel like he could trust anyone anymore, not even Combeferre, who had never, not even once, given Courfeyrac a reason to doubt his honor or integrity.

So he slept on the couch. If he could call it sleeping. Mostly it was a lot of tossing and turning and watching nature documentaries on Netflix because normally the sound of soothing voices helped him relax. But when he did drift off, he had unpleasant dreams that jolted him awake. He could never remember these dreams upon waking, could never remember what was so terrible that it shook him from sleep, but the dreams always came with a lingering sense of unease and anxiety.

And this was where it got really bad—part of him wanted to go to Combeferre, to tell Combeferre everything that happened, and just let Combeferre hold him and stroke his hair because Combeferre was perfect at those things and Combeferre would make him feel better. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t do those things. He couldn’t let himself fall anymore in love with Combeferre because falling in love only ever ended in pain for him. He’d been madly in love with Christopher. So in love that he could hardly think straight some days, but that hadn’t been enough.

He hadn’t been enough.

At least he knew that now. His love wouldn’t be enough to meet Combeferre’s needs. His love wouldn’t be enough to sustain a relationship that most people built around sex. He knew he didn’t get to have those relationships anymore, so as badly as he yearned to just break down in Combeferre’s arms and let Combeferre piece him back together—because of course Combeferre would piece him back together, of course Combeferre would help him learn how to be a whole person again—he wouldn’t let himself.

Which, he thought wryly, was becoming increasingly difficult, since he currently had his hands on Combeferre’s shoulders, gently kneading them, while he talked with his mom and Gemma. They were supposed to be working on the centerpieces for the tables, but Courfeyrac didn’t have the patience for arts and crafts—especially when they involved pinecones and gluing on sequins—and instead had taken upon himself the job of distracting Gemma and his mom from all the things he didn’t want them to notice.

Draping himself over Combeferre distracted his mom from thinking that there was anything wrong. He knew her too well and he knew how she worried. She was a little paranoid about relationships. She’d get anxious and overbearing if she thought there was trouble in Combeferre Paradise, so despite the concerned looks he kept getting from Combeferre, he carried on the charade of being the perfect couple. It would make ending this charade harder in the end, but it was worth it for now.

Being charming and flirtatious and offering witty commentary about the centerpieces also distracted everyone from the fact that Enjolras and Grantaire seemed to be on the warpath this morning. Courfeyrac had no idea what was eating at the both of them, but it was festering like some sort of gangrenous wound. They were at the other end of the church activity hall trying to assemble and decorate a lattice-work arch over the door, but their voices carried when they got loud enough. The sharpness and bitterness in their voices worried Courfeyrac. The two of them argued all the time, but normally not like this.

“No, Taire, just stop,” Enjolras snapped. Courfeyrac glanced over his shoulder and saw Enjolras standing with his hands on his hips, scowling the ribbons Grantaire was trying to weave into the lattice-work. “Those colors look awful like that.”

“I think I know a bit more about color coordination than you do,” Grantaire said. It sounded like his teeth were clenched shut.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means if it were up to you, our entire apartment would be painted fire-engine red!”

Combeferre shook his head and reached for another stick of glue for the hot glue gun.

Gemma looked worried. “Should we go separate them?”

“Don’t worry about them,” Courfeyrac said. “You know Enjolras. Sometimes you just have to let him shout a bit. They’ll be fine.”

He didn’t mention that it worried him how personal the shouting was getting. Personal attacks between the two of them were always a bad sign. He distracted himself by burying his hands in Combeferre’s hair. He leaned forward and pressed kisses between his fingertips until Combeferre reached up to still his movements. Courfeyrac frowned until he caught his mom staring at him. He forced himself to smile. He could do this.

Supposing that he could perhaps find a better (and considerably less painful) distraction than Combeferre, he sat down at the table and started toying with the scraps of pinecones and twine and sequins to make little pinecone monsters. He chattered mindlessly at his mom and Gemma and Combeferre. He used to chatter like this when he was a kid, just after his dad left. He used words to fill the painful silence left in his wake. It was second nature to talk like that now, to use words and charm and humor to deflect the less-than-happy emotions that kept threatening to overwhelm him.

After a while, Lisette came to work on the centerpieces with them. She had been arranging the flowers with Paul. Considering she was getting married in two days, Courfeyrac thought she looked rather glum.

“Something the matter?” he asked.

She glanced over her shoulder at Enjolras and Grantaire. “Are they going to keep arguing like that?”

He forced himself to smile. “They just need to get their bickering out of the way now so they’ll be pleasant at the wedding,” he said. “And in the meantime, look.” He thrust his pinecone monster at her. “Combeferre doesn’t think my new design is an improvement on the old one, but I think it’s charming.”

His smile felt a little more genuine when he heard Lisette laugh. They worked like that for another half hour or so, with Courfeyrac using the scraps from the actual centerpieces to make a dozen more of his little pinecone monsters. Courfeyrac hadn’t noticed how dangerously quiet the room had gotten until he heard something crash to the ground behind him, followed almost immediately by the sound of Enjolras swearing.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Grantaire said. Courfeyrac turned in his seat to see Grantaire bent over the broken archway, trying to reassemble it.

Courfeyrac and Combeferre were immediately on their feet to inspect the damage. He could hear his mom, Gemma, and Lisette not far behind them.

“Taire, can you just stop?” Enjolras snapped. “For fuck’s sake, you’re making it worse!”

“Would you back off? I’m trying to fix it!”

“You’re the one who broke it in the first place!”

“Enjolras,” Paul said. Courfeyrac recognized the warning tone.

Enjolras did not. “If you had just listened to me in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened! You always do this! You always ruin everything!”

Grantaire didn’t snap back this time. Instead he seemed to curl around himself. Shit. He looked like he was about to start crying any second.

“Enjolras,” Paul said again. “Why don’t you run out to Wal-Mart and grab something for us to eat?”

Courfeyrac winced and instinctively reached out for Combeferre’s hand, because he knew what was coming next. It was inevitable with the kind of mood Enjolras was in. When his temper snapped, he usually didn’t care how terrible his behavior was. He would just always say exactly what was on his mind.

“Wal-Mart?” he repeated. “Are you serious? Dad, I know you’re not much on ethical shopping, but I thought everyone knew how bad Wal-Mart was. Even if you disregard the way they treat their employees, their business practices alone—I can’t believe you’d actually give them your money!”

Lisette looked about ready to tear Enjolras’s head off—not that Courfeyrac could blame her because he was acting like an ass—but Combeferre stepped forward to defuse the tension. “Didn’t you tell me about that great deli nearby?” he said. “The one that only uses local produce? I bet they’ve got something we can go get and bring back for everyone. We’re all hungry, Enjolras. Let’s take a break.”

It was a testament to Combeferre’s master skill at handling Enjolras’s temper that Enjolras left with only the barest amount of grumbling. Courfeyrac wasn’t the only who sighed with relief once he was out of the door.

Courfeyrac dropped to his knees beside Grantaire, who was sullenly still trying to piece archway back together. “Looks like we’ll need a staple gun,” he said. “Or at least a hot glue gun. Are you okay?”

Grantaire didn’t look up at him. “It’s fine.”

“I’m here if you need to talk about whatever’s going on,” he said.

Grantaire sat back on his heels. “Any chance I can find a staple gun around here?” he asked.

“There might be one in the janitor’s closet,” Paul said, extending a hand to Grantaire. “Why don’t we go look for it together?”

Grantaire allowed himself to be pulled to his feet and he followed Paul out of the room. Courfeyrac hoped Paul would be gentle with him. Grantaire really couldn’t take another blow to his ego right now.

Courfeyrac got to his feet as his mom and Gemma went back to the table to work on the centerpieces. Only he and Lisette remained. She still looked furious.

“I could strangle him,” she said.

“I don’t think any of us would stop you,” Courfeyrac said. Enjolras’s best weapons were his words, which made him great in a debate but pretty toxic when he lost his temper with a loved one.

“I need a hug,” she said.

Courfeyrac was about to remind her that Nathan would be here soon, but she looked like she was about to start crying and he couldn’t ignore that. Despite the fact that he didn’t really want to touch or be touched by anyone right now, he opened her arms to her.

One day he’d have to learn to establish better boundaries between himself and the people around him, but until then, he’d just have to accept the pain that came with having those boundaries crossed.

~*~*~

The silence in the car as Enjolras drove to the deli was oppressive. He kept waiting for Combeferre to call him out and tell him to fall back in line, kept wanting Combeferre to press that button because it was easier to feel angry than it was to feel guilty and maybe if he could just shout a bit more, he could forget the look of devastation on Grantaire’s face.

It wasn’t until they had arrived at the deli that Combeferre spoke and by then, Enjolras’s temper had cooled significantly.

“That was uncalled for,” Combeferre said when they got out of the car and headed into the mini-mart.

“You think I don’t know that?” he snapped. His gut was already churning with guilt because he knew it wasn’t okay to talk to anyone like he’d just spoken to Grantaire, but he knew it was especially bad to talk to Grantaire like that. He knew all too well the paths his boyfriend’s mind would wander after a fight like that. He wanted to drive straight back to the church and make this right, but he honestly didn’t know if Grantaire wanted anything to do with him at this point.

“If you know that, why’d you do it?”

Enjolras dragged his hand through his hair. “Because Grantaire’s been driving me up a wall for days now?” he suggested.

“How’s that any different from normal? You two are always pestering each other. Grantaire told me once that it’s part of your charm as a couple.”

“I don’t know!” He led Combeferre to the corner of the store that had pre-made sandwiches for sale. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him!”

“Have you tried talking about it?”

“Yes, I’ve tried talking about it,” Enjolras said. “Every time I ask him what’s wrong, he lies to me and says everything is fine. I know I’m not the most perceptive person out there, Ferre, but I know when he’s lying to me about shit like this!”

“He’s got all those commissions for that children’s book,” Combeferre said. “And I know neither of you have been sleeping well. Maybe he’s just stressed.”

Enjolras shook his head. He knew when Grantaire was “just stressed” and he knew that wasn’t what this was.

“He’s been acting weird since I asked him to come to this whole debacle with me,” he said, conveniently neglecting that he hadn’t so much asked as he had demanded. “He fussed about my parents not knowing about him, but now he acts like he didn’t want to meet them at all—he doesn’t act like he wants to spend time with me!”

“You can’t honestly believe that,” Combeferre said, inspecting a sandwich in cellophane wrap. “Grantaire’s been devoted to you for years. I can’t imagine that that’s changed at all.”

“Did you see the way he was flirting with people last night? And the way he was dressed? He knows I don’t really like clubs like that and last night it was just like he thought I was boring so he was going to find someone more interesting to be with.”

“Enjolras, you know he loves you.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know why he’s acting like this!”

“Maybe an apology is in order?”

He gave Combeferre a poisonous look. “Of course I’m going to apologize,” he said. “Who do you think I am? Don’t answer that. He’s just been acting so…off and I’ve been worried about him, and then there’s this whole mess with Courfeyrac—I know this is harder for him than he’s letting on and I feel like a wretch for putting him in this position in the first place—but I can’t worry about both of them at the same time,” he said, looking up at Combeferre. “I don’t know how to prioritize one of them over the other. I love them both.”

“And they know that,” Combeferre said. “You try to sort things out with Grantaire. I’ll worry about Courfeyrac. That’s why I’m here.” Combeferre seemed to hesitate for a second, then said, “Do you know what happened last night? Courfeyrac wouldn’t say.”

Enjolras shook his head. “I saw him punch the guy and run out of the club. He was already throwing up by the time I caught up with him—and then you and Taire found us.”

“You should have seen him this morning,” Combeferre said. “He’s putting on a good show now, but he looked awful this morning. I haven’t seen him look that bad since he broke up with Christopher.”

“Don’t say that asshole’s name around me,” Enjolras said. Courfeyrac had moved on from whatever toxicity had ended that relationship, but Enjolras didn’t know if he could say that Courfeyrac had ever really recovered from it. He wasn’t the same man he used to be—and Enjolras blamed Christopher almost entirely for that.

“Did Courfeyrac ever tell you what happened between the two of them?”

“No,” Enjolras said. “About a month after they broke up, I told Courfeyrac that I was going to make him talk to someone—whether it was me or one of our friends or a therapist, that didn’t matter to me because I just wanted him to talk to someone—because it was obvious that whatever happened was eating him alive and I wasn’t going to let him suffer alone.”

“And did he?”

“He talked to Jehan.”

“And Jehan doesn’t betray secrets,” Combeferre said, sighing a little.

Enjolras understood the sentiment. “Jehan called me after he and Courfeyrac talked and he let me know that he knew what was going on and that he was going to make sure Courfeyrac got the help he needed and he said that Courfeyrac was hurting, but that as long as we supported him he’d be okay in time…but that’s the most I know.”

“I just wish he’d talk to me,” Combeferre said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“You’re helping more than you know,” Enjolras said. “If you weren’t here, Diane—I love her, really, but she’s always been a bit of a nightmare when it comes to making sure Courfeyrac has a life partner or whatever. I mean, I get it. Her husband walked out on her, leaving her with an eleven-year-old boy and no savings, but she can kind of be overbearing about it. And when she gets my mom in on it…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

“I overheard his mom talking to him earlier this morning,” Combeferre said. “Kept going on and on about how Courfeyrac doesn’t need to be ashamed of wanted and having sex and the whole time I kept thinking about how awful he had to feel about that.”

Enjolras shrugged. He’d heard Diane say things like that before. “I mean, there is a reason why he hasn’t told her. I think she’d be supportive in the end, but it’d take her some time to get used to the idea.”

“I don’t get it,” Combeferre said. “There’s nothing wrong with him.”

“She just doesn’t want him to be alone for the rest of his life. She wants him to have a better relationship than she did.”

“Don’t you think it’d be different, though?” Combeferre said. “If she knew that he still loves people? I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with aromanticism, but Courfeyrac obviously does want to settle down with someone and we could be happy together—he could be happy with anyone he chooses. Not having sex doesn’t diminish that.”

“I know that,” Enjolras said. “And you know that and I’m pretty sure Courfeyrac knows that, but he’s not ready to have that conversation yet, I guess.”

He tossed a few more sandwiches in his basket and grabbed a bag of chips off the shelf. Combeferre still looked concerned when he looked back up at him. “You worry about Courfeyrac,” he said, “and I’ll worry about Grantaire and we can tag team when we need it, okay?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Combeferre said.

Enjolras nodded. It wasn’t much of a plan and it didn’t even scratch the surface of the type of apologizing and groveling he owed Grantaire, but it was a start—and once he started something, he didn’t back down.

~*~*~

Things didn’t get any better that night. Combeferre supposed he should be grateful that they all finished the decorating in one piece. Grantaire had taken his place assembling centerpieces, leaving Combeferre and Courfeyrac to do some of the more difficult grunt work with Enjolras and Paul. Once the decorating was done, Lisette and her parents had gone to meet with Nathan and his parents to go over some last minute plans, and Diane had called it a night early, leaving the rest of them to have a “boys night” at Enjolras’s parents house.

They had ordered pizza and Courfeyrac, at least, tried initially to put on a show of how okay they all were, but he gave it up as a lost cause not long afterwards. It was the quietest gathering of friends Combeferre had ever experienced—especially considering the friends involved. Courfeyrac, Enjolras, and Grantaire couldn’t exactly be described as quiet people.

Grantaire was in the kitchen with his tablet, trying to do touch-ups for some illustrations he’d done for a children’s book that was due to go to press next week. Enjolras had urged him to take a break and eat something when the pizza was delivered, but Grantaire snapped at him and Enjolras was either too tired or too annoyed with Grantaire to snap back. He just sighed and retreated to the living room, where he turned on a documentary about the widening wealth gap in America.

While he ate, Combeferre lingered in the kitchen with Grantaire, but he didn’t make an attempt at a conversation. He suspected it wouldn’t go well. Courfeyrac bustled into the kitchen about a half hour later, bringing with him the plates he and Enjolras had used. He glanced at Combeferre and his plate of half-eaten pizza.

“You can eat that in the living room, you know,” Courfeyrac said, depositing his dishes in the sink. “Gemma doesn’t mind if you eat over the carpet.”

“My parents practically beat it into me that food belongs in the kitchen,” he said, shrugging. “I guess after twenty-odd years, it’s not an easy pattern to break.”

Courfeyrac nodded before getting a glass of water from the fridge and setting it in front of Grantaire. “I thought you finished those illustrations ages ago,” Courfeyrac said, peering over his shoulder.

“I did, but the person in charge of layout made some last minute changes, so _I_  have to make some last minute changes.”

Courfeyrac hissed in sympathy. “Well, how about some food to keep you energized?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You barely ate at lunch.”

“Yeah, because I wasn’t hungry.”

“We’ve got pizza,” Courfeyrac said, turning his back to Grantaire and pulling open the refrigerator door. “Or I can fry you up some eggs. It looks like Gemma’s got some bacon in here too. Or quesadillas, I could do that. Whatever you want, really.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Courfeyrac pulled out a carton of eggs. “Breakfast fry-up it is,” he said.

“Drop it, Courfeyrac.”

“I’m not going to drop the eggs.”

Grantaire turned in his chair. “I’m under enough pressure to fix this stupid mess without you nagging me to take a break,” he snapped. “I’ll eat when I’m hungry—and until then, you can leave me the fuck alone.”

It was impossible to mistake the look of hurt on Courfeyrac’s face. The expression lingered for a second or two more before he pushed it aside. “Yeah, of course,” he said, putting the eggs away. “Sorry about that. I was just trying to help.”

“Well, don’t.”

“Right,” Courfeyrac said.

“Courfeyrac,” Combeferre said, trying to catch Courfeyrac’s wrist as he left the kitchen.

Courfeyrac jerked away from his touch. “It’s fine,” he said.

Combeferre didn’t believe that for a second, but he let Courfeyrac retreat to the living room anyway, where he curled up in the oversized armchair across from the TV. He rubbed his hand over his face, completely at a loss as to how he was supposed to deal with everything right now. When he and Enjolras had come back with lunch earlier that afternoon, Courfeyrac had been just as affectionate and flirty as he’d been all morning…right up until the point where Diane and Gemma left the room, at which point, Courfeyrac barely even looked at him. Combeferre tried to be patient and understanding. He tried to give Courfeyrac the space he seemed to want, but his behavior had been such a drastic change in such a short time that he couldn’t help but worry. He had no idea what triggered the difference, but he really just wished Courfeyrac would talk to him so he’d know what Courfeyrac needed from him right now.

He wanted to know what he was doing wrong, because the instant he knew, he’d stop it. He’d change his behavior. He was here to try to make things easier for Courfeyrac, but now he only seemed to be making it worse. And that hurt. It hurt to think that he was in any way complicit with anything that caused Courfeyrac the slightest amount of distress. There had been in a time in their relationship where he could have pulled Courfeyrac into his arms and held him until he felt better. There had been a time when he wouldn’t have thought twice about cuddling up next to him on a couch or in a bed because Courfeyrac used to be so receptive to that sort of affection. It’d been a hard adjustment for Combeferre when Courfeyrac started withdrawing. It’d been hard to establish boundaries that had never existed between them before, but it’d clearly been what Courfeyrac needed at the time. And over the last few days, those boundaries had started fluctuating again and Combeferre remembered how much he missed this aspect of his relationship with Courfeyrac.

It worried him more than he had words to say that Courfeyrac was pulling back again now. He worried that he’d unwittingly brushed against an old scar, he worried that he accidentally hurt his friend, and now all he wanted to do was hold Courfeyrac and kiss the problems away and shield him from the sort of heartbreak that had plagued him over the last five years.

Combeferre felt surprised when the pieces of this puzzle fell together, considering how obvious it should have been. The depth of his concern transcended what he normally felt for the other man and it had turned into something unexpected. Sometime over the last few days, he’d fallen in love with Courfeyrac.

He just didn’t know how welcoming Courfeyrac would be to that love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading (and commenting and kudos-ing and being wonderful in general)! Next chapter will be up on Saturday, until then, don't be afraid to come say hello over on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	12. Interlude

**December, Three Years Ago**

Enjolras tried to focus on his family’s annual New Year’s Eve party. He really did. Courfeyrac’s family was here as well as a dozen or more old family friends who hadn’t seen Enjolras in “ages” and wanted to catch up with him. How was school? Was he ready to graduate this spring? What were his plans after graduation? Oh, law school? Did he have a school he really wanted to go to? Did he already apply? When would he hear back?

He took comfort in the fact that at least Courfeyrac would be dealing with the same questions—the very same questions, Enjolras knew, since they’d been on the same education plan for years now—but Courfeyrac didn’t have to handle these questions while fielding text messages from an increasingly distraught boyfriend.

He and Grantaire started dating a month ago, getting together just after Thanksgiving break, and while Enjolras felt so good having that relationship finalized, knowing that Grantaire was _his_ and he was _Grantaire’s_ , it meant that his investment in helping Grantaire deal with his issues had increased exponentially. He always would have cared, of course, but now that they were dating…well, he felt more involved in the problems.

And there were certainly problems. Grantaire had flunked most of his classes this past semester—which should have surprised absolutely no one because Enjolras knew that Grantaire could hardly be convinced to make it to class most days. His drinking was getting worse, and Enjolras had spent a good portion of finals week holding Grantaire’s hair out of his face while he puked in a toilet. His grandmother, the one member of his family was close to, was in the hospital and the current prognosis didn’t look good. He was spending Christmas with his mother, stepdad, and new half-brother for the first time since he started college. His depression—or whatever it was—was eating him alive.

Enjolras was out of his depth. He didn’t know how to fix this. He didn’t know if there was anything he could do to fix this.

But Grantaire was suffering and he _wanted_ to fix it.

_**[Grantaire]** Seriously, Enjolras, no one should be surprised if I don’t go back to school. I don’t think I’m likely to make it through the rest of the break_

_**[Enjolras]** Don’t talk like that._

_**[Grantaire]** Talk like what? You have no idea what it’s like here_

_**[Enjolras]** I know. I’m sorry. I miss you._

_**[Grantaire]** And you think I don’t miss you? Fuck, you’re not the one stuck with this madhouse for the rest of the holiday_

_**[Enjolras]** I’m so sorry that being home is so hard for you. Have you at least been able to visit your grandma?_

_**[Grantaire]** Yeah, for all the good that did. She didn’t even recognize me and then the stepdouche started in on how my “faithlessness” was the reason she was dying_

_**[Grantaire]** Like my faith could save her. Yeah fucking right. If there is a god—doubtful—he’s given up on my family. He didn’t save my dad, why the fuck would he save my grandma_

_**[Grantaire]** But tell that to stepdouche and he gets all crazy eyes on you and tells you that he doesn’t want such a godless sinner around his son_

_**[Grantaire]** Like I want to be around the fucking kid anyway_

_**[Grantaire]** Stepdouche is worried I’m going to turn the kid gay_

_**[Grantaire]** Don’t know why they even wanted me home to begin with. I can’t fucking deal with this. I’m going to go drink some more—if I’m going to go to hell for being a godless sinner, I may as well do it properly_

_**[Enjolras]** Please don’t, Taire. I nearly had to take you to the hospital when you drank like this during finals week_

_**[Grantaire]** Sorry sorry. You’re right. I’m such a shit boyfriend. You should just dump me already. You can do so much better than me_

_**[Enjolras]** I’m not breaking up with you. I’m just worried about you._

_**[Grantaire]** I mean it was only a matter of time really. I knew you’d realize your mistake eventually_

_**[Enjolras]** You are NOT a mistake. Can I call you later? I want to hear your voice_

_**[Grantaire]** You mean you want to make sure that I’m not passed out in a bathroom somewhere_

_**[Enjolras]** Please stop putting words in my mouth. I just want to to talk to you. I miss you._

_**[Grantaire]** What is there to miss?_

Enjolras sighed and went in search of an empty room so he could call Grantaire. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do to deal with Grantaire when he was like this—when he was so mired in his own self-hatred that he was incapable of the slightest bit of optimism or hope. No one ever taught classes on what to do when your boyfriend was depressed and suicidal. But surely talking on the phone would be better than swapping text messages back and forth. Hearing Enjolras’s voice had helped calm Grantaire down in the past. Maybe it would help now.

He went upstairs to his bedroom, knowing it was unlikely for anyone to be there—although two years ago, he’d caught a pair of high schoolers making out in his bed and he promptly kicked them out—but when he opened the door and turned on the light, he found Courfeyrac laying on his back on his bed.

That was unexpected.

“What are you doing up here?” he asked. Parties had always been more of a Courfeyrac activity than an Enjolras activity. It was unlike him to hide away like this.

“Just needed a break,” he said. “Didn’t think you’d mind me hijacking your bed.”

Enjolras shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m surprised you’re not up here on the phone with Christopher,” he said, taking a seat at his desk. Enjolras knew that Courfeyrac and his boyfriend had hit a bit of a rough patch, but last time he talked to Courfeyrac about it, things seemed to be looking up. Courfeyrac certainly seemed happier with Christopher than he had in any of his previous relationships.

“That’s because we broke up,” Courfeyrac said, staring at the ceiling.

“What? When?” Enjolras asked. “Why?”

“Christmas,” he said. “We broke up over the phone.”

“How come you didn’t tell me?” He knew that he wasn’t anyone’s go-to person to talk about matters of the heart, but he and Courfeyrac had been friends their whole life and Courfeyrac had never hesitated to talk to him about his relationship woes before.

Courfeyrac propped himself up on his elbows. “You seemed busy enough trying to take care of Grantaire,” he said. “I wasn’t about to distract you from that.”

“You’re not a distraction,” he said. “What happened? I know you and Christopher weren’t perfect, but you had a lot of hope that things were going to work out this time.”

He flopped back on the bed. “Well, they didn’t.”

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

“Do you…do you want to talk about it?” Enjolras asked. “Did you guys break up because of the sex thing?”

Did he need to start drafting up plans to beat the shit out of Christopher because it _wasn’t okay_ for people to keep hurting Courfeyrac like this?

“It’s complicated,” Courfeyrac said. He sounded close to tears now.

Enjolras moved to sit on the edge of the bed. He refrained from putting his hand on Courfeyrac’s leg because Courfeyrac was often touch-sensitive after his break-ups. Too many jackasses who used touch to try to pressure Courfeyrac into something he didn’t want. “I can listen if you want to talk it out,” Enjolras said. “I won’t even offer commentary, if you don’t want me to.”

Courfeyrac was silent for a long moment.

“It was supposed to be different this time,” Courfeyrac said in a low voice. “He’d been okay with everything and we were so good together.”

Enjolras frowned. “I know you guys started doing sex stuff together,” he said. “But that was your idea, wasn’t it? You were okay with it?”

“I was,” Courfeyrac said. “I was, but…I just…shit, I don’t know anymore.”

There was something in Courfeyrac’s voice that worried Enjolras. Something that made him think that what happened with Christopher was somehow worse than what had happened in Courfeyrac’s other relationships. “Fey,” he said gently. “If there’s anything you want to tell me, you know I’m here for you.”

“There’s just a lot of shit,” Courfeyrac said.

“And I’m here to listen to all of it.”

“I don’t really know what to say.”

“Whatever you think needs to be said,” Enjolras said. “And if you’d rather not say anything at the moment, that’s fine too.”

Courfeyrac sat up and he stared at the comforter for a moment before he started speaking in a low voice. “Christopher and I were having sex and it was my idea initially, but…I mean, sometimes it was just harder—more difficult—than others and sometimes it hurt. Not because he was, you know, forcing himself on me or anything, I just had a hard time relaxing and that was my fault. But we talked and I was pretty okay with things but then one morning—”

He was cut off by the sound of Enjolras’s phone buzzing against the desk. He reached back to grab it with the intention of silencing the call, but then he saw Grantaire’s number on the screen. Grantaire never called. He preferred texting. He wouldn’t call unless something was wrong.

“Shit,” he said.

“Is that Grantaire?” Courfeyrac asked.

“Yeah,” Enjolras said, conflicted. “I just—he never calls, Courfeyrac, and he’s been going through such a hard time—”

“Go,” Courfeyrac said. “He needs you now more than I do. I’ll be fine.”

“You sure? Because I can—”

“Don’t worry about me,” Courfeyrac said.

“We’ll finish this conversation later, okay?” Enjolras said. “I promise.”

Enjolras didn’t know at the time, but he and Courfeyrac would never finish that conversation and Courfeyrac wasn’t as fine as he claimed to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading and commenting and kudos-ing and being lovely! The next chapter will be up on Wednesday, and until then, you can always find me on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	13. Chapter Seven

The rehearsal for the wedding was, without a doubt, a complete disaster. Courfeyrac hoped—for Lisette’s sake—that this meant the actual wedding tomorrow would go much smoother. Although, at this point, he didn’t see how it could possibly be any worse than the rehearsal. It had started off bad with the air conditioning at the church busting. There were mechanics working on it now, but they’d been back in the boiler room for a while now and Courfeyrac didn’t have much hope that it’d get fixed tonight. The weather had been nice enough when they got here that they were able to throw open some windows, but a storm blew in and Gemma was worried about the wind destroying the decorations. With the windows closed, the chapel was rapidly becoming unbearably stifling.

A fact that was made worse because Courfeyrac, along with the groom and the rest of the groomsmen, were dressed in tuxes. This was a rehearsal and tuxes could be complicated, so Courfeyrac understood why they were viewed as necessary, but tuxes were also hot and suffocating. Enjolras had protested the donning of the tuxes (“Lisette’s not wearing her dress!” he had snapped. “I don’t see why I have to wear the tux!”) and Courfeyrac regretted not adding his own protests to Enjolras’s at the time.

Of course, the rehearsal was only supposed to be an hour, which was not an unbearable amount of time to wear a tux, but other complications had dragged this out. The two flower girls—young cousins of Enjolras—had gotten into a huge fight because one of the girls had more flowers in her basket than the other and it wasn’t fair. When one of the girls started crying, the ring bearer had joined in with taunts that the little girl was a baby for crying and the pint-sized fistfight that had followed had been amusing—even though one of the girls did knock out the ring bearer’s loose tooth.

Then there was the endless shuffling and reshuffling of the bridal party and the perpetual debate over whether it was better to line them up by height or personal relationships. Courfeyrac, at least, was good about going where he was told, but Enjolras, who didn’t want to be here in the first place and who was grumpy because he and his boyfriend were hardly talking to each other, kept grumbling—which inevitably had Lisette snapping at him. With as on edge as both of them were right now, Courfeyrac knew that having them snap at each other was asking for an explosive argument and luckily, Nathan realized that too. He was rather adept at distracting Lisette when Enjolras got particularly petulant and Courfeyrac was equally skilled at getting Enjolras’s attention when it looked like he was about to start ranting about the needless opulence and commercialism of weddings in general.

Really, Enjolras just needed to learn when to keep his mouth shut, but Courfeyrac knew that was a lesson Enjolras had been struggling to learn his whole life. He doubted it would suddenly click for him now.

They were about to enter their third hour of rehearsing and Courfeyrac was about to sweat right through his tux—he thanked his years of high school choir for teaching him not to lock his knees, because he probably would have passed out by this point if that were the case—and Lisette was walking down the aisle for possibly the fifth time when the heel of her shoe broke.

It appeared to be the last straw for her, and when it became obvious that she was about to cry, Nathan and her parents were at her side in an instant to run damage control.

Courfeyrac felt bad for her, he really did, but he also was ready to sell his liver to be anywhere but here.

Combeferre joined him at the front of the chapel and handed him a water bottle. “You look like you could use this,” he said.

“Sorry to make you wait through this whole mess,” he said, taking a swig from the water bottle. “We didn’t think it’d take this long.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ve been catching up on some studying and Grantaire’s still working on some of those illustrations. We can take care of ourselves.” Combeferre reached over and smoothed the lapels of Courfeyrac’s tux and adjusted the collar. Courfeyrac’s heart pounded to have Combeferre touch him. He didn’t know if that it was a good pounding or not. He needed to get out before Combeferre noticed. “You were a little ruffled,” Combeferre said.

“Only ruffled?” he said, scanning the room for the nearest exit. “I feel like I’m melting up here.”

Combeferre glanced back at Nathan and Lisette, who were still talking. “It looks like they might be a while,” he said. Already the best man and the other groomsman had taken seats on the nearest pew, and Enjolras had somehow managed to disappear in this short amount of time with Grantaire. “Maybe we could talk? You’ve been avoiding me since yesterday afternoon.”

“What are you talking about?” Courfeyrac asked, even though he knew exactly what Combeferre was talking about. “We spent the morning together at the EMP Museum.”

And he had spent the morning distracting Combeferre with various movie props and costumes from the current Icons of Science Fiction and Fantasy Worlds of Myths and Magic exhibits because he knew if he could get Combeferre to nerd out about something, then he could avoid this precise conversation.

“Yes, and every time I tried to talk to you about anything other than the exhibits, you were quick to divert my attention to something else,” Combeferre said. “Look, I’m just worried about you. I need to know that you’re okay.”

“Of course I’m okay,” he said. Lisette and Nathan were blocking the main exit out of the chapel, but there was a smaller exit off to the side which he knew led out to a back hallway. Now he just needed a reason to use it.

He made the mistake of looking at Combeferre. The concern on his face was undeniable and Courfeyrac felt guilty for lying to him.

“Fey,” he said. “I think I need to be honest with you, and I think you should know—”

No. Nothing good could come from that sentence. “I know you’re worried,” he said. “And I know I’m not as okay as I keep telling you I am, but I’ve got this under control, okay?”

“You don’t have to do this alone,” he said. “You know that, right? I want to help.”

He reached for Courfeyrac’s hand and Courfeyrac quickly shoved his hands in his pockets. He didn’t want to be having this conversation. He didn’t want Combeferre to be so _nice_. It was an unfair reminder of what he’d never have.

“I know you want to help,” he said. He took a step backwards, toward the exit. “But this is sort of something I have to handle on my own, you know?”

“No,” Combeferre said. “I don’t know. Courfeyrac, I’d do anything for you—anything at all, without hesitation—but how can I help if you won’t tell me what’s wrong?”

_What’s wrong is that I’m in love with you. What’s wrong is that I never want you to stop touching me and I never want you to let go of me but if I let myself feel that way, I’m only going to get hurt. And I’ll hurt you too and I can’t do that to either of us._

But those were words he couldn’t say. He couldn’t give Combeferre what he wanted and he tried to push back all the other memories that had been dogging him for days of other partners in other relationships and how he couldn’t give them what they wanted and needed either, but he couldn’t. “I need to get out of this suit,” he said, backing away from Combeferre. He forced himself to ignore the pained look on Combeferre’s face as he pulled away. “I just—I need to go.”

Once out of the chapel, he ran to the Sunday School classroom that had been designated as a changing room and he stripped out of the tux, feeling only momentarily guilty that he didn’t take the time to hang it up properly before pulling on his jeans and his t-shirt. His chest felt tight and he could hardly breathe and it wasn’t fucking fair! It wasn’t fair to be in love with Combeferre like this! He had sworn all of this off. He knew it wouldn’t work out—couldn’t work out. He refused to put himself in the position where his only options would be to hurt Combeferre or be hurt by him. He blinked the tears back from his eyes.

He couldn’t do this anymore.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket, found Jehan in his contact list, and went in search of somewhere he could talk in private.

“Courfeyrac?” Jehan said as he answered the phone. “What’s wrong?”

“How did you know something’s wrong?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I just figured you probably wouldn’t call me unless something was.”

“Shit, fuck,” Courfeyrac said, stepping outside the church. The storm was picking up force. It didn’t often storm like this in the early months of summer, but right now he needed it. He needed the wind and the dark clouds. “I can’t do this. It isn’t _fair_! Why did I have to fall in love with him?”

“Oh, Courfeyrac,” Jehan said.

“And you know what the worst fucking part about this is? He’s too fucking perfect! He keeps being nice and wonderful and I—I can’t, Jehan.” He was crying now, but he made no effort to reign in his emotions. He needed to get this out and Jehan wouldn’t judge him for it. “I know it wouldn’t work between us—I _know_ that. I know I don’t get to have these kinds of relationships anymore, but I—”

“What do you mean?” Jehan said. “You don’t _get_ to have these relationships anymore?”

“I’d just fuck it up,” he said. “I’d just hurt Combeferre—or he’d hurt me—and then we’d hate each other. I’m not meant for romance, Jehan, no matter how much I might want it. It’s not—I can’t—love isn’t for me.”

“Courfeyrac,” Jehan said slowly. “Just because you’re asexual doesn’t mean that you can’t have loving, fulfilling relationships. You understand that, right?”

“Every relationship I have _ever_ been in says differently.”

“To be honest,” Jehan said, “I think every relationship you’ve been in has been flawed from the start. Those people never really understood you. They never really loved you.”

“Christopher did.”

“Christopher _raped_ you, Courfeyrac.”

“It was just a mistake,” he said. “It wasn’t—he didn’t rape me. We’ve been over this.”

“You don’t treat people you love like that,” Jehan said. “What he did to you—Courfeyrac, you can’t let that dictate your life now. You need to talk to Combeferre.”

“No,” he said, brushing aside a fresh wave of tears. “I can’t.”

“Yes,” Jehan said. “You can. This is Combeferre we’re talking about. He would never hurt you—and it would kill him to know that he’s unwittingly hurting you now.”

“I _can’t_.”

“Courfeyrac, what Christopher did you, that wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t something you deserved because you didn’t love him the ‘right way,’ and loneliness is not some penance you have to pay! I really think this thing with you and Combeferre has potential, but sweetie, you have to be honest with him. It’s okay that you’ve got scars from Christopher and it’s okay that you’re not over the way _he_ hurt _you_ , but you’re only going to hurt worse in the long run if you don’t talk about this. If you love Combeferre, he deserves honesty.”

That was too much. He couldn’t let himself believe that things were as simple as Jehan made them out to be. He couldn’t talk to Combeferre. He couldn’t give Combeferre those tools to wound him with. He’d cry this out, and then he’d lock it away. He didn’t need Jehan telling him that he just needed to be brave right now.

“I shouldn’t have called,” Courfeyrac said. His voice sounded empty even to his own ears.

“Courf—”

“Sorry for bothering you.”

“You didn’t—”

He hung up the phone before Jehan could finish talking and he turned the phone off before he could call back.

~*~*~

Enjolras knew as soon as Lisette’s heel broke that this would be a matter that took a fair amount of time to deal with. Not because his sister was vain or shallow, but because he knew his sister well and he knew the signs of stress building up in her and he knew that something as innocuous as a shoe breaking would tip her over the edge.

So he used that to his advantage, and as soon as his sister was sequestered by their parents and her fiancé, Enjolras swooped in on Grantaire, who was sitting off to the side, sulkily working on his tablet. Enjolras had been staring at him all night, thinking over and over again all the things he wanted to say and all the things he wanted to _hear_ and he wasn’t going to let Grantaire drag this out anymore. Yes, he’d said some awful things and he regretted them and he’d apologize for them, but so far, Grantaire hadn’t given him the chance to do that.

That was going to change.

He took Grantaire by the hand and pulled him to his feet. “We’re going to talk.”

“Enjolras, I don’t—”

“We need to talk,” he said, tightening his grip on Grantaire’s hand and pulling him out of the chapel. Grantaire was silent as Enjolras led him down the hall to an empty Sunday School room. Enjolras flipped on the light and closed the door behind them.

“Okay, Taire,” he said. He tried to keep his voice even, knew that snapping at Grantaire would just make things worse at this point, but he also knew that he wasn’t alone in screwing up their relationship. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Oh, you suddenly care now?”

“I’ve _always_ cared!”

“Well, you have a funny way of showing it!”

“That’s because I have no fucking clue what’s going on with us anymore, Taire! You won’t talk to me.”

“There’s nothing to say,” Grantaire said. He moved to the door, but Enjolras stood in front of it, cutting off his retreat.

“You’re not leaving until we’ve talked this out,” he said. Grantaire’s reluctance to stand and fight over this worried him. Enjolras could handle fights and shouting and generally screwing up, but he couldn’t handle Grantaire giving up on him. He couldn’t handle Grantaire giving up on their relationship.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Grantaire said. “I thought everything was fairly obvious.”

“Obvious?” Enjolras repeated. “Grantaire, I have no idea what’s going on! I’ve tried asking you about it and you shoot me down every time, but if you think that anything is _obvious_ about this, then surprise! It’s not! Now tell me what’s going on.”

Grantaire dragged his hand through his hair, rough enough that Enjolras was sure that it hurt, which made him want to gather Grantaire into his arms and just forget any of this had happened—but that wouldn’t fix the problem. Enjolras wasn’t going to run from it anymore.

So he waited.

Finally the silence became too much for Grantaire. “Why did you never tell them about me?” he demanded. His voice was raw.

“Who are you talking about?”

“Your fucking family, Enjolras. They didn’t know I existed until two weeks ago. Do I mean that little to you?”

“That’s what this is about?” he asked, honestly feeling surprised. He knew Grantaire had been bothered by it in the beginning, but he thought they’d sorted it out…

Apparently he was wrong.

“Do you have any idea what’s been going through my head this whole week?”

Enjolras shook his head.

“You’re ashamed of me,” he said. “That’s why you never told them. You don’t think I’m good enough for you. You don’t think I’m good enough for your family. You don’t think they’d approve—that’s why you hid me from them! I’m your fucking guilty pleasure and nothing more—and you know what, Enjolras, there was a day when I would have given anything to just be your guilty pleasure, your shameful secret, but not anymore! Not when I thought you loved me!”

“Of course I love you!” Enjolras said. “I love everything about you. I can’t sleep without you. I can’t _think_ without you. I can barely function without you at this point!”

“Then why didn’t they know about me?”

Enjolras sighed. He had his reasons for keeping his relationship a secret and he knew that none of them were logical. “You’re not going to like the answer,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“How much do you remember from when we first started dating?” he asked.

“I was drinking too much to remember much,” he said quietly. “You deserved better than that, I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I disappointed you. Is that why you didn’t tell them?”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Enjolras said. “But let me tell you what I remember from those first few months. You were drinking _all_ the time. Your grandmother was sick and you thought she was going to die. You were flunking out of school. Your depression was the worst it had ever been and your life was crumbling down around you—and you acted like I was the only thing keeping you afloat some days, Taire, and that _terrified_ me.”

“Sorry, I’m sorr—”

“No,” Enjolras said. “You don’t have to apologize for that. You were sick. It wasn’t your fault. But the way you talked back then—every time we argued, I thought you were going to break up with me. You would go on and on about how I deserved so much more than you because you couldn’t see what I saw in you. And every time you went quiet—Taire, I thought you were going to kill yourself! I thought I was going to wake up one morning and find your suicide note taped to my door. As far as I was concerned, I was at risk of losing you every day.

“And how was I supposed to explain that to my mom? How was I supposed to tell her that I was so in love with someone who I didn’t think loved me enough to keep me around? You clung to my love like it was a life raft, but your own self-hatred was pulling you down farther every day and I could barely hold on for the both of us. I was scared, okay? I was scared and I didn’t know how to tell my parents that. I was scared they wouldn’t see all the wonderful, beautiful parts of your soul. I didn’t know what to do. What if I told my parents about my beautiful boyfriend only to have him break up with me two days later? What if I told them how happy you made me only to have to invite them to your funeral a week later? I didn’t know how to do any of that and there was no one I could talk to about this—so I didn’t. I didn’t say a word.

“And the longer I didn’t talk about it, the better you seemed to get. The better we worked together, the stronger you were—the happier you were! And every time I thought I could tell them—something went wrong. You’d have a bad day or we’d fight and I’d say something cruel and you’d go quiet, and I’d get scared all over again. I know it’s all coincidence, Grantaire, I know it, but in my head…” He shrugged. He knew how foolish he sounded. “I was a little superstitious, okay? I thought I would jinx us by telling my parents. I know you all think I don’t have an illogical bone in my body, but I do when it comes to you, okay? When it comes to you, I can’t _think straight_ and if keeping you a secret would save your life, then like hell was I going to tell anyone!”

“Enjolras—”

“I know it’s ridiculous, okay? And I know that it wasn’t fair to you, but I—”

Grantaire cut him off with a kiss. A proper kiss. One with lips and tongues and hands and heart. So much heart. Grantaire pulled their bodies close and Enjolras moaned against him because he missed this. He missed this so much.

When Grantaire pulled back, he framed Enjolras’s face with his hands. “I am so sorry,” he said.

“You don’t have to apologize. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know that,” he said. “We paid that therapist a lot of money so I’d know that, but I had no idea how much I hurt you back then and I am so sorry that you ever had to worry about me like that.”

“You’re worth it,” Enjolras said.

Grantaire snorted. “Yeah, right.”

“No, Taire,” he said. “You are worth it. You are worth every sleepless night I have spent worrying over you, and I’m sorry that you still don’t see that. And I’m sorry that I make it worse—shit, the things I’ve said to you this week, the way I’ve acted—”

“We’ve both done stupid things,” Grantaire said.

“You were hurting,” Enjolras said. “I should have been more aware, more sensitive.”

“I was hurting,” Grantaire admitted, “but I was also acting like an immature little shit half the time. We’ve both screwed this up, Enjolras. Stop being so selfish. There’s plenty of blame to share.”

Enjolras chuckled. “Look at the pair of us. We’re a mess.”

“A hot mess,” Grantaire said.

“I can think of a way to make it hotter,” Enjolras said. He wanted the sort of affection and intimacy they hadn’t dared share since they got here. He wanted Grantaire.

And clearly, Grantaire wanted him.

That was exactly how Enjolras liked it.

Fifteen minutes later, Enjolras was half out of his tux—he wanted it off completely but Grantaire said he looked too hot—and he was on his knees between Grantaire’s legs (with Grantaire properly undressed) and he was trying to keep his moans quiet and at one point he had to pull away and threaten to gag Grantaire because he was nearly shouting Enjolras’s name and they were in a church and his parents were somewhere in the building, but mostly Enjolras didn’t care. Mostly all he could think about how much he loved the taste of his boyfriend in his mouth and how much he loved hearing his name on his boyfriend’s lips and how he never knew that he could love someone as much as he loved Grantaire right now.

He swallowed when Grantaire climaxed, relishing in the way Grantaire kept whispering his name over and over again.

And that’s when Combeferre walked in.

~*~*~

“Seriously, you guys?” Combeferre said. He had his back to Grantaire and Enjolras as they cleaned up a little and Grantaire put on some clothes. “This is a _church_. I’m not even religious and that just seems wrong to me!”

He was a little surprised that this was the first—and hopefully the only—time he walked in on the two of them carrying on considering he and Enjolras were living together when Enjolras and Grantaire started dating and all of their friends knew of the two of them went at it like rabbits. But he’d been wandering the building looking for Courfeyrac, who never returned to the chapel after taking off his tux, and when he saw the light on in this classroom, he figured maybe Courfeyrac had ducked inside here to be alone for a bit.

Instead, he got treated to the Enjolras and Grantaire sex show.

“You can turn around,” Enjolras said. “We’re decent.”

Enjolras was blushing, but Grantaire just looked a little smug as he pulled on his t-shirt. “Sorry about that,” he said, not really sounding sorry at all. “Were you looking for us?”

“I was looking for Courfeyrac, actually,” he said. “But I suppose you two were a bit busy to have seen him.”

Enjolras and Grantaire traded a concerned look. “Is he missing?” Enjolras asked.

“He said he wanted to change,” he said. “And I checked the room you guys were using as a dressing room, and his tux was there, but he wasn’t. I have no idea where he is and his phone is going straight to voicemail.”

“This is a church,” Grantaire pointed out. “I doubt he could get into much trouble here.”

“We should still look for him,” Enjolras said. “You know he’s been having a hard time of it.”

“I think I made things worse,” Combeferre said, leaning back against the door.  He’d just been trying to talk to Courfeyrac. He wanted to be honest with him because he’d always been honest with Courfeyrac. Not to pressure him into a relationship he might not want—although part of him felt that this might actually be what Courfeyrac wanted—but because Courfeyrac deserved to make an informed decision about this. But mostly he wanted to help and he worried that his feelings clouded his judgment.

“Combeferre,” Enjolras said. “I don’t think you’re actually capable of making this worse.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said. “I kind of might have fallen in love with him.”

There was a beat of silence before Grantaire said, “Well, that was unexpected.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “But I think I’m in love with him and I just wanted to talk to him because I know something’s wrong and I just wanted to help, but I probably came on too strong and now he probably wants nothing to do with me. He’s been avoiding me all day.”

“He’s been avoiding all of us since that bachelor party,” Grantaire said. “It’s not just you.”

“I just don’t want to see him hurting like this anymore,” Combeferre said. “He deserves someone who loves him for who he is, not in spite of it—and I know I can be that for him, but only if he wants that too. I just…I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do at this point.”

“Well,” Enjolras said, “we should try finding him first. And once we know that he’s okay, you two can talk. I’ll make sure my parents and Diane give you guys some space for a bit.” Enjolras smiled at Combeferre. “It’s going to be okay.”

Combeferre nodded, hoping that Enjolras was right. Enjolras made up a list of places they could try looking for Courfeyrac and they split up. Enjolras and Grantaire both promised to text him if they found Courfeyrac before he did.

He glanced out a glass exit door as he passed, not expecting to see anything more than the deluge of rain. He doubled back when his brain processed the large lump he’d seen sitting under the streetlamp near the parking lot. He didn’t care that it was pouring rain outside and that the wind was strong enough to rip leaves off trees. He hurried outside, only just managing not to slip on the wet grass and fall, and he sat down next to Courfeyrac.

Courfeyrac was already soaked to the bone and his hair was matted flat against his head. He looked at Combeferre when he sat down, and his eyes were red. Because of the rain, it was impossible to tell if Courfeyrac was still crying or not. He wanted to gather Courfeyrac into his arms, wanted to hold him until this pain went away, but he knew instinctively that he needed to give Courfeyrac space right now. He couldn’t pressure him to accept comfort or even to talk about this.

So instead he offered up a sad, sympathetic smile—a humble but heartfelt offering on the altar of his love—before looking straight ahead.

Maybe Courfeyrac wasn’t ready to talk about whatever was plaguing him. Maybe he’d never be ready.

But Combeferre would sit with him all the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! Thanks so much for reading and commenting and kudosing and being wonderful and amazing! I'm in the middle of packing up my apartment to move for the *third* time this year, so getting those email notifications really brighten my day! Next chapter will be up on Saturday and until then, you're always welcome to come say hello on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	14. Interlude

**March, Two Years Ago**

Grantaire was doing better. It was the first time in a long time that he could make that claim. Two months of weekly therapy appointments and six weeks on anti-depressants and he was feeling okay. He was feeling stable. And that stability balanced him out well enough that he could untangled the self-destructive thoughts in his head and see the things that were going _right_. He and Enjolras had been together for four months now, and Enjolras had yet to get sick of him or give up on him. It was thanks to Enjolras that he sought out therapy at all.

But he was also at a place in his life where he could see that while he was finally piecing himself together, Courfeyrac was falling apart. He’d broken up with his boyfriend months ago, and while Grantaire understood that a mourning period was normal and even expected, what Courfeyrac was doing was more. Grantaire was practically an expert in depression and self-destruction at this point. He could easily recognize it in Courfeyrac. He’d been brushed off the few times he’d brought it up with Courfeyrac—Courfeyrac had been so supportive of him for so long that he couldn’t stand the thought of not offering help in return—and the last time he’d broached the subject, Courfeyrac had just snapped at him and Jehan told him in a low voice afterwards to give Courfeyrac some space.

Grantaire didn’t take orders very well, and it wasn’t a week later that he and Courfeyrac bumped into each other on campus one night. Grantaire, having officially dropped out at the beginning of the semester, had only come to bring Enjolras some dinner, and Courfeyrac had just finished taking a midterm.

“Mind if I walk you home?” Grantaire asked, hurrying to catch up with Courfeyrac when he spotted him on campus.

Courfeyrac just shrugged.

“How’d your test go?”

“Probably terribly,” Courfeyrac said. “Couldn’t concentrate.”

Grantaire knew how that went. There was a reason he’d dropped out of school. “Ah, well, it’s your last semester of your undergrad and you’ve already been accepted into law school. I can’t imagine that they’ll give you the boot just because you did bad on a single midterm.”

“They will give me the boot if I can’t keep my grades up,” he said. “Or if I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong before law school starts in the fall.”

“You’ve hit a rough patch,” Grantaire said. “That doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. Just…I don’t know. Cut yourself some slack or something. You used to be pretty good at knowing when you needed to take a break.”

“Yeah, well, things change and my classes aren’t as easy as they once were. I can’t just coast.”

“You never coasted. You’ve always worked hard, but you used to balance it with partying hard. You need a break, so let’s do something tonight. We can go get dinner or dessert or something.” He threw an arm around Courfeyrac’s shoulders. “My treat.”

Courfeyrac shrugged away from Grantaire. “Not interested,” he said tersely.

Grantaire let out a deep sigh, wondering whether or not it was worth pushing the subject. He decided that his former roommate resembled a kicked puppy too much not to push the subject.

“Courfeyrac,” he said. “I think we should talk about this.”

“Talk about what?”

“I’m not blind,” he said. “None of our friends are, either. We can see that there’s something wrong and we’re worried about you!”

“Yeah, and I’ve told Jehan to tell the rest of you to piss off. I’m…dealing with this.”

“No, you’re really not,” Grantaire said.

“What?”

“I know what it looks like to not deal with your shit, and that’s exactly what you’re doing!”

“I’m doing the best I can, okay? I don’t need you and everyone else nosing around.”

Grantaire sighed. “Have you…have you at least considered talking to a therapist about what’s going on? If you’re not going to talk to your friends, you should be talking to someone.”

“Your boyfriend gave me the same advice,” Courfeyrac said. “And what makes you think that I _haven’t_ been to see a therapist about this?”

“You have?”

“Several of them,” Courfeyrac said bitterly. “And every last one of them seems to think that I’m not interested in having sex because I’ve endured some kind of trauma and _not_ that I’ve endured trauma because I’m not interested in having sex! My sexuality is not a dysfunction—but good luck convincing anyone else of that!”

“I don’t think you’re dysfunctional,” Grantaire said.

“Yeah, well, you’re just about the only one.”

“Forget what those stupid therapists said,” Grantaire said. “They’re full of shit. But I’m still worried about you, Fey. You’ve changed.”

“You have too.”

“That’s because I’m finally getting my shit together. You seem to be having the opposite problem.”

“Well what else do you expect me to do, Taire? Something had to change, and it obviously wasn’t going to be everyone else!”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t keep falling for people and expecting them to be okay with who I am,” Courfeyrac said. He sounded exhausted, defeated. “It’s just not going to happen.”

“So you’re giving up.”

“I’m moving on,” Courfeyrac said. “I would love to fall in love and spend the rest of my life with someone, but every time I try, I just get hurt—and it’s not worth that any more. I’m sick of being labeled a tease or a prude or being called frigid. I’m sick of people not being able to untie sex from love, and I’m _sick_ of being made to feel bad about myself for something that I can’t change.”

“Courf, I—”

“But you know what I can change? I can change my behavior. I can stop flirting and draping myself all over everyone. I can stop doing things that give people the wrong idea. I can stop opening my heart up to this kind of trauma over and over again. I can’t do this anymore, Grantaire, and I’d really appreciate it if instead of nagging me about how different I’m acting, you and the rest of our friends would just try to support my decision!”

Grantaire hesitated for second before pulling Courfeyrac into a hug. Courfeyrac was stiff, but he soon relaxed into the hold.

“I’m just so tired,” Courfeyrac said, burying his face against Grantaire’s shoulder. “And I don’t think I’ll ever not feel lonely.”

“I am so sorry,” Grantaire said. “And you’re not alone—you’ve always got us.”

“It’s not the same.”

“I know,” Grantaire said. “But we’ll be here for you all the same—no matter how you change or don’t change. I’ll make sure the others give you some space, okay? None of us meant to make this harder for you. We’ve just been worried.”

Courfeyrac nodded.

“How about we go back to my place? I’ll keep you company until Enjolras gets home, and then we’ll drive you back to your place.”

“That sounds nice,” Courfeyrac said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends! Thanks for reading and commenting and kudos-ing and being wonderful specimens of human beings! You never fail to brighten up my day :) The next chapter will be up on Wednesday, and until then, you're always welcome to come say hello on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	15. Chapter Eight

The wedding ceremony was lovely, if a bit long in Grantaire’s opinion. Of course, he’d been raised Catholic and had once been subjected to one of those atrociously long ceremonies, and in comparison, this wedding was short. But Lisette and Nathan had written their own vows and Lisette lacked her brother’s talent for knowing how to keep an audience engaged when making a speech. None of that really mattered though. Grantaire just spent the whole wedding discreetly making faces at Enjolras, determined to make him laugh.

He nearly got him in the middle of Lisette’s vows, but Grantaire suspected the stern look Gemma was giving Enjolras kept him in check.

After the ceremony was a luncheon for family and close friends. Lisette and Enjolras actually got along for the entirety of the lunch, which Grantaire attributed to the fact that Enjolras had slept well the night before. He’d forgotten how surly his boyfriend could get when sleep deprived, and last night had been the first time in nearly a week that they had a shared a bed. It had taken a fair amount of debating to talk Gemma into it and when Gemma protested about allowing an unmarried couple to sleep together behind closed doors, they had compromised by spending the night on the lumpy pull-out couch in the living room. Gemma figured that sleeping in a public area of the house would discourage anything more than sleeping and cuddling, but Grantaire would have slept on the floor in Enjolras’s parents’ bedroom if it meant that they were allowed to sleep together.

He’d fallen asleep in Enjolras’s arms last night and that alone worked some sort of miracle in his brain. It didn’t matter that the mattress on the pull-out couch was thin and that he had a metal bar digging against his hip all night so hard that it left a bruise. He had Enjolras, sleeping beside him for the entire night. He didn’t know what it was about sleeping together but it seemed to put them back in sync with each other. Grantaire still had some lingering insecurities over everything, but Enjolras was attuned to him once more and could not only discern those insecurities with a mere glance, but he could also dismiss them with a kiss.

The reception that night was a formal, sit-down meal which would be followed by dancing. Grantaire and Enjolras had skipped out on the cocktail hour preceding the reception and spent some much needed time alone in the back seat of Enjolras’s Prius. They cleaned up and made it to the reception just in time for Enjolras to take his place in the receiving line next to Courfeyrac, who was wearing the same forced smile he’d been wearing at the wedding ceremony. Grantaire noticed that whenever Courfeyrac thought no one was looking, his smile vanished and his face settled into a depressingly maudlin expression.

It wasn’t an expression Courfeyrac wore well.

Grantaire left Enjolras in the receiving line with a kiss and went to find his table in the church activity hall. He was impressed with the decorating. Working on it the other day had been ten different kinds of a disaster, but it paid off. White Christmas lights wrapped in tulle were draped from the ceiling, providing a soft, ambient light for the room. The sturdy folding tables and chairs had been covered with tablecloths and slip covers and the pinecone centerpieces crowned the center of each table.

Grantaire and Combeferre had both been relegated to a table for various extended family members while Enjolras and Courfeyrac would sit at the head table with the bridal party. Combeferre was already seated when Grantaire showed up and he was busy folding and unfolding the cloth napkin that had been left at his seat, deep in thought.

He looked up from his napkin folding when Grantaire sat down. “I’m surprised you and Enjolras didn’t check into a hotel and ditch the reception,” he said.

“We talked about it,” Grantaire said, grateful that the elderly relatives they would share the table with had yet to arrive. “But we decided not to risk Lisette’s wrath.”

“Lisette’s too blissfully in love right now to notice who’s here or not,” Combeferre said. “It’d be Gemma’s wrath you’d be facing.”

“Either way, I’d rather not be on the receiving end of wrath from anyone in that family.” He took a sip of water from the glass at his place setting. “How was cocktail hour?”

“Painful,” Combeferre said. “There was a lot of socializing and introductions and I don’t care what Courfeyrac says, he’s not okay right now, but he just kept up his fake smile and his fake laughter so no one would know something more was going on. I can’t stand seeing him that way. It just feels…wrong.”

Grantaire nodded. He understood what Combeferre meant. Some people wore melancholy and depression well. Grantaire could manage it most of the time and Jean Prouvaire managed to make melancholy look down-right beautiful, but Courfeyrac wasn’t meant for that kind of sadness and he didn’t wear it well. He tried to mask it and usually only succeeded in making himself look defeated. He had no idea how many people who didn’t know Courfeyrac well would notice it, but to it his close friends, it was frightfully obvious.

“Were you able to talk to him at all since last night?” he asked.

Combeferre shook his head. “It’s not exactly a conversation I want to have in public and, unlike some people, we didn’t have access to a car we could go hide in for a couple of hours.”

Grantaire smirked. “I regret nothing.”

Grantaire and Combeferre cut their conversation short with the arrival of Enjolras’s various relatives with whom they’d be sharing the table. The conversation shifted to introductions and get-to-know-you questions and Grantaire was surprised that Enjolras’s aunts and uncles seemed as interested in news of Courfeyrac from Combeferre as they did of news of Enjolras from Grantaire. The aunts and uncles had enough questions and anecdotes to fill the conversation straight through dinner.

Immediately after dinner was the first dance between Lisette and Nathan, followed by the bridal party dance. (Grantaire was very privately amused to watch Enjolras dance with a woman because he just seemed utterly perplexed by the whole situation.) During the dances, the adults at the table were occupied enough that Combeferre and Grantaire could continue their previous conversation.

Combeferre couldn’t keep his eyes off Courfeyrac the entire time.

“I just can’t stand seeing him like this,” he said. “And even…even if nothing between us works out, I just need to know that he’ll talk to someone about whatever’s going on and that he’ll work through it.”

“This isn’t something that you need to sort out right now,” Grantaire said. “We’re driving back to Sacramento tomorrow and then the two of you can sort this out without a million different relatives hovering around. He might open up if he’s not worried about making his mom worry.”

Combeferre shook his head. “I worry if I don’t get through to him now then he’ll just shut down and pull away. He’s already started it. He hasn’t looked this bad since he and Christopher broke up and you remember how bad things got then.”

“You’ll get through to him,” Grantaire said. He did remember how bad Courfeyrac was in the aftermath of his break-up with Christopher. Back then, Courfeyrac had been running hard from whatever had gone wrong in his life, but now Courfeyrac looked lost. Grantaire figured that if pushed the right way, Courfeyrac would open up. “Dance with him,” he suggested to Combeferre, nodding to the dance floor where the bridal party dance was wrapping up. “He seemed plenty relaxed and open with you at the bachelor party. Maybe it’ll work again.”

Combeferre looked doubtful, but he admitted, “Certainly couldn’t hurt to try.”

~*~*~

Courfeyrac had woken up in the morning knowing that this would be the last day that he allowed himself and Combeferre to carry on this mad charade. He barely slept last night agonizing over the decision because being with Combeferre felt so right in so many ways, but he couldn’t do this anymore. He couldn’t keep pretending that this was something he could have without getting hurt.

He wouldn’t get hurt anymore.

And he wouldn’t hurt Combeferre either.

All through the wedding ceremony, instead of focusing on Lisette and the happiness of her day, he pondered the words he’d say to break his own heart. It was foolish to have done this in the first place, to remind himself of what he could never have, and he should have told Combeferre that they needed to dial things down ages ago. But it’d been a nice illusion and he didn’t say anything and now it was going to _hurt_ but that was okay.

Better to hurt himself now, better to be in control of the pain he’d feel, than have this get any worse.

There had been various times during the day when he’d tried to work up the nerve to explain to Combeferre why, exactly, he needed to put an immediate halt to their charade, but every time he tried, there was a ready excuse at hand to put the moment off, to delay the pain just a little longer. A relative to be introduced to. A chore to take care of for Gemma or Lisette. A joke that needed told.

By the end of the bridal party dance, Courfeyrac made up his mind that this all needed to end _now_. It’d do himself absolutely no good to spend the night dancing with Combeferre and teasing himself with the possibility that maybe he could pretend just a little longer. Dancing would just make things harder.

Combeferre, apparently, had different ideas about the dancing.

The DJ played another slow song after the bridal party dance and invited all the couples in attendance to come dance if they wanted. Courfeyrac had barely seen the bridesmaid he’d been dancing with back to her seat when Combeferre intercepted him.

“Would you like to dance?” he asked.

The logical thing would be to say _no_. The logical thing would be to have a discreet conversation with Combeferre now and be done with it. But logic had never been Courfeyrac’s strong suit—no, he was the _pathos_ to Enjolras and Combeferre’s _logos_ and _ethos_ and he knew it—so he said yes. He would allow himself one last dance, one last turn around the floor in Combeferre’s arms.

And then he would end this.

The song playing was the usual sort of sappy love song played at wedding receptions—the sort of thing that inspired people to believe in soulmates and One True Love and all the things Courfeyrac didn’t let himself believe in anymore—but he was surprised that Combeferre seemed to know every word to this particular song. Combeferre held him tight, his arms supportive and comforting without being possessive or restrictive, and softly sang the words in Courfeyrac’s ear. The moment was too perfect. It was something out of a romantic comedy and in a perfect world, this would be when Combeferre confessed his love and promised Courfeyrac that nothing would ever hurt him ever again.

When the song ended, Combeferre leaned just a little closer and whispered, “I know things have been hard lately, but I want you to know I’m here for you. In whatever capacity you need me. I don’t know…I don’t know if it’s something you’d want, but I’d like to give us a shot if you’re interested.”

Courfeyrac looked up at him, shocked at the words that had just come out of the other man’s mouth. But Combeferre looked so loving, so hopeful and Courfeyrac choked back the emotions that threatened to swallow him. This was hard enough when it was just his own heart on the line. He didn’t know if he could do this to Combeferre too.

But he _had_ to. He knew that.

Courfeyrac pulled away from Combeferre and muttered some half-assed excuse about needing air because he need some time to muster the courage to do this. Combeferre called after him, but Courfeyrac didn’t stop, pushing himself through the crowd and out into the hall.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Combeferre was just supposed to be a decoy boyfriend, someone he could introduce to his mother to hold off questions until he felt a bit better prepared to handle them. He wasn’t supposed to fall in love. Combeferre wasn’t supposed to fall in love.

How had he screwed this up so much?

Combeferre found him pacing in the foyer, his hands fisted in his hair as he tried to work this out in his mind.

“Courfeyrac?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I need you to stop!” he said, spinning around.

“Stop what? What do you mean?”

“I can’t—we can’t—this was just supposed to be a charade,” he said. “A con. Just a fake little fling to keep my mom off my back. And I can’t do it anymore, okay? I can’t have you—we need distance. This is messing with my head and I can’t anymore.”

“How is it messing with your head? Talk to me, Courfeyrac. Tell me what’s going on.”

“This was supposed to be _fake_ , Combeferre! But my heart got involved and now it needs to stop before we make this worse!”

“It doesn’t have to get worse,” he said. He hesitated for a moment, looking unsure of himself in a way that made Courfeyrac want to hug him. “I think we might be on the same page here. This doesn’t have to be fake. We can give this a shot. We can give us a shot.”

Feeling frantic, Courfeyrac shook his head. “I can’t do this! I can’t play at something I’ll never have!”

“But you can have it,” Combeferre said. He reached out, trying to take Courfeyrac’s hands in his own, but Courfeyrac pulled back. If he allowed Combeferre to touch him now, it’d ruin everything. He didn’t have that much self-control. “That’s what I’m been trying to say.”

“No.”

“Courfeyrac, please, I’m in love with you—I can’t stand to see you like this. Just talk to me. Tell me how I can make this better!”

Courfeyrac flinched, his heart pounding against his chest. “What did you say?”

“I love you, Courfeyrac.”

“No. You can’t. You can’t love me.”

“Why not?”

“Love has only ever meant pain to me!”

“It’ll be different with us.”

“It never is,” he said. “You don’t understand.”

“Make me understand. Please tell me what happened.”

Courfeyrac made the mistake of meeting Combeferre’s eyes. He couldn’t refuse those eyes. “You really want to know what happened?” he said, feeling completely raw. Everything else was falling apart, he might as well rip open old scars while he was at it. “I loved someone and I let him love me and we destroyed each other, Ferre. I can’t do that to you!”

“You won’t,” he said.

Bless his soul, he meant it. He was wrong, but he honestly thought they could make this work.

Courfeyrac shook his head. “That’s what he said, too. He said he was okay with who I was, but he wasn’t and when I couldn’t give him what he wanted, what he needed, he took it from me!”

“He took—Fey, what are you trying to say?” Combeferre’s voice was hard, but there was something like sympathy or pity lacing it.

He didn’t want pity. He wanted Combeferre gone so he could nurse his broken heart in private.

“I’m saying that I woke up one morning to find my boyfriend fellating me because he was sick of being turned down,” he said. “He had his mouth on me and his fingers in me and it was a mistake because I wasn’t giving him what he needed, but I didn’t _want_ that!”

Courfeyrac was breathless after his confession and he had rendered Combeferre speechless. He watched and he waited for Combeferre to process it all, waited for Combeferre’s anger and his pity, because Courfeyrac had no doubt that would be the reaction he’d face.

He wasn’t prepared for the heartbreak in Combeferre’s eyes, like it caused him pain to hear Courfeyrac disclose such a painful memory.

“Courfeyrac,” Combeferre said when he finally found his voice. “I am so sor—”

“Don’t tell me you’re sorry,” Courfeyrac said. His voice sounded brittle to his own ears. He was too close to falling apart. “It was a mistake. He didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know what?” Combeferre said, his anger coloring his voice. “That having sex with someone who’s asleep is rape?”

“It wasn’t rape, okay?” Courfeyrac said quickly. “Why do people keep saying that?”

“Because it _was_!”

Courfeyrac shook his head. “No, it wasn’t. I was supposed to like it. He wasn’t hurting me and people are into that sort of thing, but I’m not normal and there’s something wrong with me.”

“Courfeyrac,” Combeferre said slowly. He was using a tone of voice that he only used on the rare occasions he needed to be heard without the chance of Courfeyrac or Enjolras interrupting him. It was the voice he used to make people pay attention. “There is nothing wrong with you. Circumstances might not be what you wanted, but you. Are. Not. _Wrong._ ”

Courfeyrac felt tears burn in his eyes.

“You can’t—you don’t know what you’re saying,” he said. “I won’t trap you in some sort of loveless relationship. I won’t do that you!”

“It wouldn’t be loveless, Fey.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be interested sex again. Christopher _hated_ me in the end and I can’t go through that again. I can’t make you hate me.”

“I’m not Christopher, and I’m not asking for sex. I’m asking for your heart.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Courfeyrac said again, desperate to make Combeferre understand. “You don’t know how hard it is.”

Combeferre crossed his arms over his chest and approached this from another angle. “To be fair, neither do you,” he said.

“What?”

“You don’t experience sexual attraction, right?” he said. “You can’t miss what you’ve never experienced. You’ve never had to abstain from the sexual attraction you feel for someone, so you don’t know how hard it is. And what I’m trying to say is that you are worth whatever sacrifices I choose to make—and it would be my choice, Courfeyrac. You’re not forcing me to do anything, you’re not trapping me or tricking me—but you are worth that to me. Your happiness and your health and well-being are more important to me than my cock!”

“I can’t let you do that,” he said. Combeferre’s words were pretty enough, but Courfeyrac couldn’t let himself believe that this would be any different than any of his other relationships.

“Courfeyrac, I want to be a part of your life in whatever capacity you’ll have me and if you honestly and legitimately don’t want a relationship with me, then I will accept that, but I will not be driven away by you telling me what I allegedly do and don’t want.”

“Then what do you want?” Courfeyrac said, frustrated.

“You, Courfeyrac! However much of you or little of you you will allow me to have!”

Courfeyrac was silent. He had no words for that proposition and he was saved the burden of finding them by Enjolras’s appearance. He looked reluctant, like he knew he was interrupting something.

“Fey,” he said, “they’re about to do the garter toss and my mom wants all the groomsmen in there for pictures.”

“Right,” he said. “Of course.” He slipped past Combeferre without making eye contact. He still didn’t know what he was supposed to say or do, so he fled.

“Are you okay?” Enjolras asked as he accompanied Courfeyrac back to the dance floor. Lisette was sitting in a chair right in the middle of the floor, laughing at something Nathan was saying to her.

They made love look so effortless, so easy.

It wasn’t fair.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Fey, I’ve known you forever. I know when you’re lying to me.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did Combeferre—”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, casting an angry look at Enjolras.

Enjolras had the good sense to look chastised. “Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

Gemma spotted them and ushered them closer, explaining the sort of pictures that she and Lisette wanted taken. Enjolras complained about having to watch someone grope around under his sister’s dress and Courfeyrac forced himself to laugh and made a quip about how Enjolras would have to return the favor when he and Grantaire got married.

After that, Enjolras didn’t have time bother Courfeyrac with questions because he was too busy trying to assure his mother that no, he and Grantaire didn’t have any plans to get married anytime soon.

Courfeyrac mustered up a smile for the pictures and he tried to keep himself from staring at all the happy couples in the room. He was usually pretty aware of couples around him, but now it felt worse. Now it felt like the entire room was taunting him with what he couldn’t have. He had a wonderful, beautiful, perfect man waiting for him out in the foyer, prepared to sacrifice his own sexual desires for him, and Courfeyrac couldn’t have him.

It would never work out and he had to keep telling himself that. He wasn’t wired for the happily-ever-after. It didn’t matter that the loneliness was overwhelming most days. It didn’t matter that he was in love with Combeferre or that Combeferre was apparently in love with him. Courfeyrac had been down this road too many times before. It couldn’t work out.

He was lost in his own thoughts, thinking of how hard it would be driving back to Sacramento tomorrow and pretending that he hadn’t destroyed his own heart, when his mother came up next to him and handed him a drink.

“You look glum,” she said.

He shrugged.

“Weddings are supposed to be happy affairs,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”

Courfeyrac watched Nathan launch Lisette’s garter into a crowd of bachelors. He studied the bemused smile on Nathan’s face, like he couldn’t believe how lucky he was, and he watched the way Lisette couldn’t take her eyes off Nathan. He glanced across the room and caught sight of Enjolras and Grantaire sitting at a table and he noticed, not for the first time, how Enjolras and Grantaire seemed to revolve around one another, like some sort of unstoppable gravity was constantly pulling them together.

“They all make love look so easy,” he said.

His mom’s laughter took him by surprise. “And it’s all an illusion, sweetheart,” she said. “Love is never easy, not when you want it to last. Your dad thought it was supposed to be easy and when he discovered that he needed to work at it to keep our relationship alive, he left. You and I weren’t worth the work to him, and if I wished anything for you in life, it’d be that you don’t make the same mistakes your dad did.” She gave him a sly look. “I don’t know what’s going on between you and Combeferre, but if you love each other, then you owe it to him and to yourself to put in the work.”

He stared at his mom. Was Combeferre worth the work that they were both going to need to do to make a relationship work?

It was barely even a question.

He thrust his drink back at his mom and kissed her on the cheek before rushing out of the room.

He needed to find Combeferre.

~*~*~

Combeferre stayed in the foyer after Enjolras pulled Courfeyrac away, trying to make sense of everything that had happened. He had known, on some vague intellectual level, that Courfeyrac having been raped or abused by previous romantic partners was a distinct possibility. Courfeyrac had always been prone to giving too much of himself to other people. But his vague understanding had done nothing to prepare him for the anger and the pain he felt at hearing Courfeyrac disclose what had happened between him and Christopher.

He had half the mind to track down Christopher and murder him. He even knew how to make it look like Christopher died of natural causes.

But none of that would help Courfeyrac and right now that was all he wanted. He wanted to help Courfeyrac. He wanted to help him see that what happened with Christopher wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t the sort of treatment Courfeyrac would have to tolerate in exchange for being in a relationship. He wanted to give Courfeyrac the relationship he deserved.

In the face of Courfeyrac’s stubbornness, though, he was beginning to think that convincing Courfeyrac that he deserved any sort of healthy, romantic relationship would be nigh impossible.

Grantaire came looking for him not long after Enjolras had whisked Courfeyrac away.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I got through to him.”

He was afraid that nothing would get through to Courfeyrac.

Grantaire just nodded. “Are you okay?”

“The jury’s still out.”

“Why don’t you come back in,” he suggested. “They’ve got an open bar and I know how to mix a mean cocktail.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” he said. Getting drunk could wait till they were back in Sacramento. “I think I just need some time alone.”

“All right,” Grantaire said. “Enjolras and I will be just inside if you need anything.”

Combeferre nodded his thanks and watched Grantaire go. He used the time alone to figure out what he was supposed to do about all this. If Courfeyrac honestly didn’t want a relationship, then he would respect that. He’d be a shitty friend not to, and he understood that, but he wasn’t convinced yet that Courfeyrac really didn’t want a relationship. He thought it was more likely that Courfeyrac was afraid, and he couldn’t blame him for that, not after knowing how Courfeyrac had been treated by people who professed to love him.

If he couldn’t get through to Courfeyrac tonight, he’d wait till they were back in Sacramento before bringing it up again. He’d give Courfeyrac time and space to think things over and he’d do his best to be a supportive friend. It’d break his heart a little each day to see Courfeyrac deny himself the chance to be happy, but this was Courfeyrac’s choice. It had to be.

He just wished he knew what to say to make Courfeyrac understand that the rewards of their relationship would far outweigh the risks.

Combeferre took a deep breath, preparing himself to rejoin the reception, when Courfeyrac practically barreled into the foyer. He skidded to a stop a few feet from Combeferre.

“Did you really mean it?” Courfeyrac asked, breathless.

“Mean what?”

“When you said that you’re in love with me. Did you really mean it?”

“Of course I meant it.”

Courfeyrac nodded. He looked nervous, scared. “I don’t know how trust people anymore,” he said. “I don’t—this scares the shit out of me, you see that right? I’m a mess and this isn’t going to be easy.”

“I didn’t say I wanted easy,” Combeferre said, his heart pounding. He couldn’t screw this up. “I want _you_. I want your laughter and your compassion. I want your happiness and your affection. I want to learn how you need to be loved—and to give you that. I want you to love me in whatever capacity you have to offer.” He closed the distance between them and reached out to take Courfeyrac’s hands. Courfeyrac didn’t pull away. “I want _this_.”

“You already have it.”

“What?”

“My heart. My love. You have it already.”

Combeferre blinked at him. “That…I wasn’t expecting that,” he said, laughing nervously a little. He’d never felt so awkward around Courfeyrac, but it was the best possible sort of awkwardness.

Courfeyrac offered up his own nervous laughter. “Yeah,” he said. He was blushing and it was beautiful.

Combeferre grinned and licked his lips. “This seems—well, after everything this feels kind of silly, but Courfeyrac, do you want to go out with me?”

“Yes.” Courfeyrac’s response was immediate and he seemed to speak with his whole body.

“You have no idea how happy you’re making me right now,” he said. He couldn’t stop grinning. “Can I kiss you?”

Courfeyrac snorted a little. “What is this? Our wedding?” He shifted his weight a little, looking unsure but hopeful. “Combeferre, you may kiss your boyfriend.”

Combeferre leaned in, but he let Courfeyrac set the pace and terms of this. It was gentle—hesitant, even—but it was so full of hope. When Combeferre pulled away, he held out his hand to Courfeyrac. “Enjolras and Grantaire are probably worried by now,” he said. “Let’s go share our good news.”

Courfeyrac took his hand and laced their fingers together. “The best news.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish readers and happy end of finals/good luck with finals to those of you finishing up the school semester right now! Thank you all so much for reading and kudos-ing and commenting and saying hello on tumblr and being your wonderful selves. The final installment of this fic will be up on Saturday, and until then, feel free to come say hello on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com)!


	16. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I nearly forgot to post this because I'm at my parents' house for the holidays and I've been super busy with various family things! Replies to comments from the last chapter will be coming soon, I promise!

**December, A Year and a Half Later**

 

Courfeyrac had blossomed.

Maybe that was a cheesy or creepy thing to think, but it was the best way Combeferre had to describe the change in Courfeyrac as he watched his boyfriend. It was Christmas Eve, and they were at Courfeyrac’s mother’s house with Enjolras and Grantaire. Enjolras and Grantaire had been banned from Enjolras’s house after they had started bickering about the decorations.

Combeferre suspected that it had been a deliberate move on their part to get out of decorating.

He was in the kitchen helping Diane with some baking, but he could see and hear Courfeyrac in the living room, helping Grantaire tease Enjolras about the plans for their upcoming wedding.

“I don’t care what my mom says,” Enjolras said. “We are having a small, _small_ civil ceremony and then an equally small gathering of family and friends to celebrate afterwards. I am not living through the nightmare of Lisette’s wedding again.”

Courfeyrac laughed. “Isn’t it so cute that he thinks he has a say in this?” he said to Grantaire.

“Well, I’d rather Gemma have her way than my mom,” Grantaire said. “She’s trying to convince me that we need to have a Catholic wedding—never mind that I haven’t set foot in a Catholic church since she got remarried—and don’t Catholics still have a thing about two dudes shacking up? I don’t even know anymore.”

“Exactly,” Enjolras said. “Which is why we are going to have a small civil ceremony—”

“You can keep saying that as much as you want,” Courfeyrac said. “That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. In fact, Gemma was telling me yesterday about all her plans for your reception. You’re going to hate it.”

The sound of Courfeyrac’s laughter while Enjolras groaned carried into the kitchen.

“You know,” Diane said. “I haven’t seen him this happy in ages, and I know I have you to thank for bringing his laughter back to me.”

Really, Combeferre thought, she had months and months of weekly appointments with a therapist to thank for it. It was one of the first things Combeferre had insisted on doing when they got back to Sacramento after Lisette’s wedding. What Christopher had done to him—it was obvious that Courfeyrac internalized the wrong messages during and after that relationship, and Combeferre knew that having someone to talk to would give him a healthier perspective on everything. Courfeyrac hadn’t been keen on seeing a therapist at first, and Jehan had been the one to explain that Courfeyrac had tried therapy before but hadn’t found a therapist who didn’t view his asexuality as a problem. It had taken some work, but Combeferre managed to track down a few asexual-friendly therapists with Enjolras’s help and, at Courfeyrac’s insistence, he attended Courfeyrac’s first appointment with him for moral support.

But having a professional to talk things over with had done wonders to help Courfeyrac come to terms with his past relationships and help him feel comfortable and okay with himself again. It’d been a struggle and sometimes Courfeyrac had walked away from those appointments feeling worse than he had going in. Sometimes he pushed Combeferre away after tough sessions—not wanting to be seen or heard or held—only to call him up in the middle of the night a few days later to rant about how that stupid thing his therapist said was _right_ and why couldn’t he just be done with this already.

But he stuck with it—he even balked when, after a particularly bad session, Combeferre suggested that maybe they should find a therapist who was a better fit for him (“But I like this one!” Courfeyrac had said indignantly at the time)—and it had been worth it.

“It’s nothing,” Combeferre said to Diane. “Really. I love seeing him like this.”

Diane put some cookies on a plate. “Which is exactly why you’re the sort of person I always hoped he’d fall in love with,” she said, handing him the plate. “I think I’ve got everything in control here. Why don’t you go take them some cookies?”

Combeferre was all too happy to oblige. He took the plate into the living, smiling at the way Courfeyrac’s eyes lit up at the sight. Combeferre liked to think the excitement was for him, but knowing the love affair Courfeyrac harbored for his mother’s cookies, it was likely that the adoration in his eyes was for the sweets.

“Are those the snickerdoodles?” Courfeyrac asked.

Combeferre held the plate over his head, easily out of Courfeyrac’s reach. “Kiss me and find out.”

“You’re such a tease,” he said, but kissed Combeferre on the lips and then held out his hands. “Cookie, please.”

Combeferre put the entire plate in his hands.

“Great,” Enjolras said. “Now there won’t be any left for the rest of us. You know he’s not going to share.”

Grantaire snorted. “That coming from the man who drank the entire pot of coffee this morning.”

“I was tired,” Enjolras said.

“You should have gone to bed when I suggested it last night,” Grantaire said.

Enjolras smirked. “I don’t recall you complaining last night when I—”

“Ew, gross, Enjolras,” Courfeyrac said. “TMI. I don’t need to hear about your gross sex life.”

Courfeyrac meant the remark with good humor, but Combeferre knew that any sort of discussion about sex still left Courfeyrac feeling uncomfortable. It was something he tended to avoid when he could, and the few times the topic of sex had come up between the two of them, they’d argued. With all the progress Courfeyrac had made in purging himself of the unhealthy expectations his past relationships had left him with, Combeferre knew there was still a part of him that felt he was denying Combeferre something or being cruel to him by not bringing sex into the relationship. Combeferre had no intention of having sex with Courfeyrac, not when it was clear that Courfeyrac was still uneasy about it, and, feeling stubborn and afraid that he was self-sabotaging his relationship, Courfeyrac occasionally hurled accusations that Combeferre was coddling him and trying to protect him from himself.

The arguments that followed were harsh, not because either of them were deliberately trying to be cruel, but because they involved digging up a lot of sensitive issues, and by the end of these arguments, both of them were left feeling raw and vulnerable.

It was strange, Combeferre always thought, but he always felt closer to Courfeyrac when they made it to the other side of those arguments. Something about being able to tough through issues that made both of them uncomfortable assured Combeferre that the love he shared with Courfeyrac was stronger than their obstacles.

Because for all the arguments and tense, fragile conversations they had, Combeferre had never been so certain of anyone’s love for him. Courfeyrac showered Combeferre with affection in ways that he didn’t often know how to reciprocate. Despite the fact that Courfeyrac was about to start his last semester of law school, he always made time for Combeferre, who was every inch the over-worked and overwhelmed medical school intern. The fact that he could come home from his internship at the hospital every day and he knew that Courfeyrac would be there for him, ready to offer whatever support was needed, had gotten him through more than one impossible day.

As he watched Courfeyrac fight off Grantaire with one hand to protect his plate of snickerdoodles and listened to his laughter fill the room, Combeferre knew he wouldn’t trade this relationship for anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's the end, folks! I hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it :D Thank you so much to those of you who've taken the time to leave a comment or a kudos!
> 
> For interested parties, I've got a few other fics in the works right now, and I'll be back sometime after the new year with more angst-with-a-happy-ending stories (because that really seems to be my sweet spot). In the meantime, feel free to say hi on [tumblr](kingesstropolis.tumblr.com) or stalk me there for writing updates <3


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